


How You Leave

by Dreadnought



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: (Mostly) trauma-recovered Bucky Barnes, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Atomic bittersweetness, Badass SHIELD administrator Bucky, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bittersweet Ending, Bottom Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes's degrading body, Bucky escapes Hydra early, Capsicle (Marvel), Cultural rediscovery, Death Acceptance, Death and Dying, Disaffected Bucky Barnes, Disco loving Steve, Dubiously admired public figure Bucky, Emotional thawing, Explicit Sex, Friends to Lovers, Gay Steve Rogers, Grief and Loss, High functioning Bucky Barnes, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Jewish stuff, Learning to live through dying, Lesbian Character, Lonely Bucky, Medical Realism, Multi, POV First Person, References to torture and gaslighting, Sad, Sickfic, Some lingering post-traumatic stress stuff, Sorrow and joy, Suicide Themes, Terminal Illness, Til the End of the Line, Top Bucky Barnes, With attempts at honoring prior canon, bucky barnes pov, but not a morose melodrama, cap!bucky, death denial, emotional numbing, mixed with comic book science, pretty slow burn, secrets and lies, workaholic Bucky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:47:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 109,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27658376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreadnought/pseuds/Dreadnought
Summary: I check the monitor again, just as Steve’s eyes slide open. He looks into the camera. He looks into me. And I— I don’t know how to do this part. I never planned for this. I never dared to wish it into life, because I knew it would only bring me pain. And I was done with longing for the dead people and the dead world behind me.This is a different kind of pain from the one in my shoulder now, as the skin frays around the place where it meets metal. It’s a pain of my reality crashing into this, into Steve Rogers. Alive. Drifting back into my life as I begin to drift out of it.
Relationships: Bucky Barnes/random people including even women(!), James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Comments: 321
Kudos: 146





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>   
>   
>  “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
> 
> -Marcus Aurelius  
>   
>   
>   
> 

April 3, 2012

I’m pretty sure I’m dying.

Tony, on the other hand, doesn’t seem convinced yet.

“Look, they’re already starting the next trial,” Tony says. He swivels his chair and crushes the small foam ball in his hand. “This is just the science.”

As far as I know, the science is a lot of mice. There are probably new ones now, crawling around in plastic cages in a vault-like lab on the fourteenth floor. And there’s probably a pile of old ones somewhere — shrunken mice or mice that have mutated into monstrous shapes. Maybe they’ve already been autopsied and thrown in the incinerator. Another failure, another promising number crossed off a list of possibilities that only goes up to 14. I think this was caspase number nine.

Tony leaps to his feet and slams the ball to the floor, bouncing it back into his hand. “Okay, my turn.” He motions for me. ”Bring her over.”

I’m not sure why he decided that it’s a “her,” like a battleship or a classic car. I asked him once and he only tilted his head and said he didn’t know, that she was just beautiful is all. That was five arms ago, circa 1994. It was a pretty decent first try, but the torque was garbage, it was too heavy, and it was a full second slower than my brain. It was a mildly terrifying and completely humiliating time for both of us.

I follow Tony over to a bench tucked into a corner of the room, a nook with a door that can be locked down, far from the window, far from the room’s entrance. I strip off my jacket as I walk.

“You need the shirt, too?”

“Please no. JARVIS, initiate AUSTIN. Full protocol.”

“Oh God,” I grumble.

I never really know where the speakers are, but from them comes a series of muffled ‘70s beeps, gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology, yada yada yada. I never saw the Six Million Dollar Man, but Tony lived on a steady diet of the reruns, to nobody’s surprise. He lets the whole thing play, throwing himself into another chair, throwing the ball in the air, while all my specs load onto the sizable monitor under the heading of the program’s backronym.

I take my seat and lay my arm on the table, palm up.

“How’s the new suit coming?”

He lets out a puff of breath through pursed lips. “What’s Russian for ‘unmitigated disaster’?”

I shrug. It’s one language I never developed an enduring hunger for, also probably to nobody’s surprise.

He tsks. “And you even have a super hot language partner. How is Miss Rushman?”

I don’t know why he keeps asking me about her. He knows Romanoff and I barely speak, outside of the technicalities of mission planning, debriefings, and logistics. We can’t seem to quite get un-stuck from our game of distant watching.

“She’s busy,” I say.

Tony opens the access panel on my arm and clicks a cable into the single port.

“AUSTIN, authenticate.”

Tony’s Stark Industries employee photo pops up on the monitor, and the small LED light next to the port glows. His picture is replaced by a stream of output, lines of raw code that he squints at before slipping on an oversized pair of glasses. They magnify the dark circles under his eyes.

“You look tired.”

Tony doesn’t take his eyes off the monitor. He types on a keyboard layout I have never been able to understand. “Yeah, well, your body is keeping me up all night.”

I smirk. I’m glad it’s only that. I hope it’s only that. I spent so many years striving toward Tony’s normalcy, his humanity, but I never expected that he would be forced into the horrors of my life. Combat. Torture. A prisoner of war. A foreign, inorganic thing embedded in him now. I was so scared for him, maybe more scared than I’d ever been since leaving Hydra. Finding him alive was impossible. And yet, there he was. Here he is. An impossible man.

“Pepper is starting to get jealous,” he says.

“Jealous of what?”

I swivel toward the door to Tony’s protest of “watch the cord, Jesus.” Pepper is in the doorway, her hands folded in front of her. She looks typically sharp in a tailored jacket and a long, painted-on pencil skirt.

“How’d you get in here?” Tony asks.

“I’m the boss, Tony. Remember?” She smiles at me. “Oh, I like the haircut.”

I’ve been dragging my hand over my head for days, ever since my hair stylist took a number 2 to the sides. He left the top, blow dried the floppy mess of it into a quiff, and proclaimed me fashionable. Very Williamsburg. I have no idea when that became a good thing. He defines the quality of my haircuts by neighborhoods. Do you want it to look more UWS or more SoHo? Ooh, maybe a little East Village! I tell him to just not make me look too Staten Island, and he laughs and says _oh honey you could never look Staten Island_. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the only way he thinks I understand style, through a language of gentrified neighborhoods in a city neither of us even live in.

“Thanks.”

Her mouth flattens. She talks to Tony. “Remember you have a meeting at—”

“Nope.”

“Yes. This is your second reschedule.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“I know this is difficult for you to understand, but a company needs money to keep going and I am not—”

“C’mon, you can easily—”

“I am _not_ going to singlehandedly brief the entire CME Group on nuclear fusion energy futures.” She pronounces this decisively. “They want you there.”

Tony groans. It’s a theatrical thing, head thrown back, eyes rolling. Pepper turns her attention back to me.

“How are you?”

I nod to my arm. “Just getting a software update.”

“Firmware update,” Tony corrects. “And seriously, you’re not supposed to be able to get in here.”

Pepper is skilled in the art of benignly neglecting Tony’s comments, but I can tell from his voice that he’s not pleased. He talks to AUSTIN in a low voice. _Open up security settings._

“The tower looks good,” I say.

Every time I come to the city, the skyline is a little different. Stark Tower a spire of progress in Midtown, the new World Trade Center climbing out of the former ruins of downtown. I can’t remember the last time it felt like my home.

Pepper’s smile starts big, with teeth, before she clamps it down. “Yeah, it’s all coming together. We should be going live next month.”

“ _Will_ be going live next month,” Tony says.

They make eye contact in the intense way couples do when they slam up against a recurrent argument in mixed company.

“Do you need anything?” she asks me. “Something to drink? Did you have lunch yet?”

“ _l_ did not have lunch yet,” Tony interjects.

I think I’m finally hungry. I hitched an early ride on a cargo transport into Teterboro, and poor Happy had to drive us into the city at rush hour. I forced a bag of trail mix into my mouth in the back seat but couldn’t stomach anything more substantive.

“It’s not your job to order us lunch,” I say.

“It’s not my job to order _his_ lunch but you’re our guest, so I’m happy to get yours.”

I shrug a shoulder. “I guess a… meat, chicken something. Whatever. I’m not picky.”

“A meat chicken something whatever. Okay.”

“And I’ll have a lettuce chicken something whatever,” Tony says. The corner of his lips quirks up. He mouths the words ‘thank you,’ as if it would be too embarrassing for all of us to hear his gratitude. Maybe it would be.

I thank her aloud.

“Let me know when you’re done.” She points to me as she disappears out the door. “I want an update.”

“Sure.”

An update on what, I don’t know. My life is on the same steady track it’s been on for years. Training, missions, program development, meetings, my days at the Triskelion intensely full, my nights at home short. I’m pretty sure Tony hasn’t told her about this, given how squirrelly he’s being. He’s probably buried the project in the biomedical department, labeled it ‘cancer research’ or something that belies the singular focus on my degrading body.

The door to Tony’s shop slides closed. He eyes me as he types.

“You need to eat more. You’re down four kilos.”

“I’m eating enough. It’s just not sticking.”

His jaw ticks. “I’ll figure this out.”

I have no doubt that he will try.

—

Peggy raises a silver eyebrow at me. It’s not a tell. I haven’t yet discovered any actual tells that she has. It’s one of her many feints out of a rolodex she has tried on me over the past twenty years.

She pushes a green chip to the small pile already resting at the center of the table.

I call with one of my own.

“Are you sure? You’re getting a little light.”

I eye the dwindled pile of chips by my left wrist. I lost well over half of it two hands ago during a fantastic botch of a bluff. I swear I used to be better at this.

“It’s not like we don’t know how this already ends,” I say.

“Well, there’s always a first time for everything.”

Peggy flips over the fifth card, and I suddenly have two weak pairs. I don’t flinch a muscle. Neither does she, until her hand flirts over her pile of chips, her skin nearly translucent and dusted with light brown spots, her veins high and blue. But I see the shadow of her younger self there in her painted fingernails, in a kind of stubborn grace that still governs so many of her movements.

She pushes forward a hundred. I shove the rest of my chips into the pot.

We lay down our hands.

“God damn it,” I mutter.

A little chuckle rolls out of her, and she pulls our fake money toward her. “Maybe next time, darling.”

It’s now my turn for a laugh.

“Oh come now, it’s not all that bad,” she tells me.

“Well, you’re the only one who seems to think so.”

We already ran around the Maypole about the probability of Tony figuring this all out. Maybe he will, maybe he could, he’s done so much already, he has the best teams on it, there’s still time, et cetera. But for as much idealism as a founder of SHIELD requires, Peggy has also become a fierce realist after clawing herself through the decades, fighting for every inch along the way. She knows deeply, like I do, the inevitable course of this. She seems to be the only one wise enough, brave enough, to have an honest conversation about it.

“That’s because I live with it every day,” she said earlier. She paused there, folding her hands on the Afghan heaped on her lap. “I know what’s coming, always.”

I hate what’s coming for her. I hate that this will take her incredible mind before it takes her body.

“How’s your sister, by the way?” she asks as she begins to sort chips and lay them in a handsome wooden box.

“Fine.”

I will never tell Peggy how Rebecca is. I will never tell her that she thinks I’m a scary per diem nurse named Tom, that sometimes she thinks she’s a child, that she knows me only in brief stretches that make her weep inconsolably. I will never tell her that I despise our visits and that I’m thinking about stopping them entirely. I wonder if I will ever get the chance to start feeling that way about Peggy.

I want to tell her that I also wonder if I’ve lived a decent life. If I’ve done enough. If I’ve weighted the scales enough to create a crude sort of balance somewhere. But I’m too afraid to ask, because I know she will be truthful.

“How do you live with it? How do you decide what to do?” I ask instead.

She looks out over her garden, freshly erupting with the colors of early spring. It’s more lush every time I drag myself over the water to visit her, pulling a few days from an engorged pile of accumulated vacation hours that never seems to go down.

“I imagine every day as my last and go from there.”

Peggy calls her children. She watches her grandchildren play here, scattering their toys on the grass. She sits in the sun when it peeks out from behind overcast English skies. She drinks tea. She plays poker with an old friend. She fills her days with life.

But she will die alone. As she must. As we all must, returned to our truest nature, like every other animal on this earth.

My pocket vibrates. I don’t want to reach inside, but I always do.

_Get back here now. Deep shadow. Transport at Barton Ashes Airfield in 15 mins_

I can’t suppress a sigh. I’m not ready to leave.

“Duty calling?”

“Fury calling. _Deep shadow conditions_ ,” I mock.

She smiles. “Well, you’re not very good at deep shadow, are you?”

I snort. “You know I am.”

Peggy laughs now, and this is why I love her. Because nobody else would dare. “Yes. Of course you are.”

I rise and circle the table. She looks up at me with a wavering smile. She is still so beautiful, brilliantly and fantastically alive. I need to remember this. I need to carve it into the walls of my mind and bathe it in light.

I bend down and kiss her on the cheek.

“See you next time, Peg.”

I feel her hand then, cold but strong, wrapping around my own. She gives it a squeeze.

“It’s going to be all right. Whatever happens, it will be all right.”

I blink a little as I walk the cobblestones to my rental. The path blurs and clears in front of me. Mortality feels strange. I’ve been rattling around with the idea for months now, ever since my days started to feel exhausting and my sleep started feeling necessary. Ever since my shirts stopped fitting quite as well and eating started feeling like a chore. Ever since Tony took his first concerned blood sample and started talking without that spark of fond irreverence that almost always colored his words to me.

Part of me imagined that I might live forever, that I might keep going as everyone around me withered and disappeared. As I lost Tony and Peggy and Rebecca and Harding to the tireless progression of time, as I’ve lost so many already. But knowing my own death, seeing it creep along my horizon, has been less terrifying than I ever imagined it might be. Some days I find myself staring it down. Some days I even reach a hand out for it.

Because I am tired. My body is tired. If the soul is a real thing, it is tired, too. On that horizon, I am beginning to see relief. I wake up in the morning, and it is there. It is there when I go to sleep. Watching me. Waiting. And I don’t think I’m afraid.

I do believe Peggy. It will be what it is. What it has to be, finally.

Finally.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

We follow the sun back across the Atlantic, so it’s still daytime when the Gulfstream lands at Reagan. I descend the narrow stairs, the sole passenger, duffle bag hiked high on my shoulder. My mind has been racing since we left Heathrow, my body restless. I switched seats at least four times. I shoved down two entrees, just in case, as I ran through the possibilities. Ten Rings. AIM. Hydra. The world has been so quiet lately. Too quiet, like an emergency room before a ten-car pile up.

Harding and Kirkpatrick are waiting for me. Kirkpatrick is very polite, a good old New England boy who greets me in accordance with my rank, his vowels charmingly elongated.

Harding, on the other hand, rolls her eyes as I pull out my cigarettes and light up.

I give a nod to Kirkpatrick, but it’s Harding that I talk to. “So, what’s the deal?”

“The deal is that we’re supposed to take you in as soon as you land, not wait while you smoke.”

Kirkpatrick gives her an uneasy look.

I drop my bag to the ground. I will take my little rebellions, if only to remind everyone that I can. “Okay, but seriously, do you know what’s going on?”

Harding shakes her head.

“Whatever it is, sir,” Kirkpatrick says, “it’s got Coulson twitchy.”

I feel my brow tense as I take a drag off my cigarette. Coulson is the one guy who is reliably not twitchy. I don’t think I’ve seen him startle once. “I don’t even know what twitchy Coulson would look like.”

Kirkpatrick clasps his own wrist in hand and rolls onto the heels of his dress shoes and then onto his toes, head rotating from side to side like he’s on the lookout for someone.

“That’s actually pretty good,” Harding tells him.

I shake my head. “I swear to God, if this is more Asgardian space trash, I’m gonna be pissed.”

“I don’t think it’s that.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. It feels different.”

Harding would know. She was in New Mexico, my first assignment with her, watching through the monitors with me as Coulson tried to interrogate a dirty, ambiguously hot alien named Donald Blake.

There’s a trill of a ringtone. Harding pulls her phone from the pocket of her suit coat. “Agent Hill wants to know why we’re not on the road yet.”

“I dunno. Tell her I’m taking a shit.”

She levels a hard stare at me. “I’m not telling her that.”

I grit my teeth and throw my half-smoked cigarette to the tarmac. “Fine, fine. Jesus.” I hoist my bag and toss it in the back seat of the Explorer, sliding in next to it.

Harding hits the lights as soon as we pull out onto the road. Kirkpatrick gleefully jams his fingers into the button that makes the siren go _whoop-whoop_. Cars part for us; Harding rides the shoulder when they can’t.

“Is it there?” I try again. “Is it at headquarters, whatever it is?”

Harding grips the wheel hard with her left hand and flips through screens on her phone with her right. “Yeah. It just got there three minutes ago.”

“And you have no idea.”

Our eyes meet in the rearview mirror. “If I knew anything, you’d know it, too.”

I trust this. She would tell me. She hasn’t earned the rumored nickname “The Barnes Whisperer” for no reason. She knows how to pause me with a look or a remark that might seem careless to anyone observing. When she talks, I listen. I let myself be wrangled by her, and nothing inside me tells me to stop.

I flip through my messages on the drive. Bullshit reply-alls, weekly employee wellness updates. Nothing to suggest what we are about to get into. I wonder if I’m going to the armory when we get there. They usually tell me when I need my shit, but nobody is telling me anything, so I have to prepare for all contingencies.

The guards check our IDs at the gate and wave us through. Harding drives full-tilt over the bridge, because if you keep your speed, you can get a little lift at the end when the road descends into the garage. We must get at least half a foot, and Kirkpatrick whoops like the siren.

When we finally reach the elevator, I enter and throw out my arm when the doors threaten to close. Harding and Kirkpatrick don’t follow.

“Sub-level 5,” she tells me.

“You’re not coming with?”

“It’s above our pay grade,” Harding says.

My stomach clenches. My arm drifts back down to my side, and the doors slide closed. The last thing I see is Harding’s hand as she gives me a little wave.

“Sub-level five,” I murmur.

The elevator moves with an eerie silence, the motion of it almost imperceptible. The only acknowledgement of my descent is a dull but pleasing beep as it slips past one floor and then another.

When the doors open, the first and only person I see is Coulson. The hallway is so quiet that even the soft march of my tactical boots resonates through it.

“Agent Barnes,” Coulson says, pushing himself off of the wall he was leaned into.

“Agent Coulson.”

“I assume you haven’t been briefed.”

“I have no idea what I’m doing here.”

Coulson swallows, his Adam’s apple dipping beneath the crisp collar of his shirt. His eyes lock onto mine. Sometimes his eyes look pale blue and sometimes they look green. But I feel them more than I see them today. They are cagey.

“Oh, boy,” he breathes.

“Oh, boy what?”

“I... think you should just see for yourself.”

In addition to not flinching, Coulson also does not stutter. I am officially nervous.

I jerk my chin down the hall.

We walk side by side, past a series of sealed doors. He stops in front of one that seems indistinguishable from all the rest.

We look into the camera mounted on the right side of the door, and our pictures pop up on the panel below it. Heads turn as we enter, and not just any heads. The top of the food chain. Fury, Hill, a few Level 8s and a Level 7. An uneasy tech planted in front of a keyboard.

“About time you got here,” Fury says.

I don’t know what else to do in moments like these except shrug.

They’re all gathered around a monitor. Between sets of shoulders, I catch a blur of white cold weather suits, not a good sign, circling around a gurney. Also not a good sign.

“Is this some alien bullshit?” I just need to know.

Fury steps to the side, making way for me to get closer to the monitor. Nobody in this room is saying a word, but I feel their eyes on me. On the other side of the wall, there’s a low murmuring coming through the comms.

_Can you get a read?_

_I’m only getting ice here._

_There’s no way._

_Look, nobody’s dead until they’re warm and dead._

In the video, there’s a clearing as a few suits rush to workstations in a flurry of interrupting voices.

_We need a—_

_I need a—_

And I…

I see. I see him.

“Barnes.”

I’m shoving. I don’t know who. I don’t care who. I shove until I reach the door that I know leads to him. I look to the biometric reader. I say my name. I say it again. I press my palm to the blackened panel and I’m yelling.

“Okay, okay, just let him in.”

The door slides open, and a blast of frigid air hits my face. I step into the supercooled room and the white suits turn. I’m frozen, my attention locked on a pair of boots. Then legs swallowed by ice. Then a star. I don’t seem to be doing anything, and so they go back to working.

_We need an EKG._

_That can wait. We need a CPB first._

_We need to get an internal temp._

_From where?_

_Get this ice cleared._

Commands and counter-commands. The chaos is palpable. Two of the suits fire up loud saws and start cutting through the ice. Chunks of it drop to the floor.

The door slides open and an agent rolls a large machine through. More ice disappears.

Hands work around him, sliding across his uniform, their gloved fingers searching for clasps and belt hooks.

“Just cut it off! What the fuck are you doing?”

It’s my voice. Everyone stops. The suits look at me, then to each other.

“We were told to try to—”

“Cut it.” Hill's voice over the speakers.

And they do, one suit stationed at each limb. The ones at the legs slice into the leather of his boots with what look like bolt cutters. They peel off the layers — his uniform, the wet-looking t-shirt underneath that clings to the ridges of his muscles. His underwear. They strip him down until he’s naked and terrifyingly blue. His fingers and toes are almost black.

One of the suits pokes at a panel on the wall, and I feel a shock of heat coming from the air ducts above.

_Let’s get femoral access for the CPB._

_Get a cath going. Try to get a temp._

_Get the EKG running._

They pass towels over his chest and stomach, down the lengths of his arms and legs. His face, his neck, his groin. Another suit presses patches on both sides of the heart and in a line that traces below his left pectoral.

They look at a monitor. Rows of lines populate the screen. They are all flat.

_Asystole._

_That’s fine. Get that cath in._

Someone approaches the table with a tube. The suit coats the end of it in thick lube and takes Steve’s dick in hand. He starts to feed the tube in, and I clench my stiff hand and watch the others drape his stomach and limbs in thick, gray blankets with cords attached to them, running like strands of linguine to a power strip on the floor. With the Popeil Automatic Pasta Maker, you can make pasta from scratch in under three minutes, you can’t make any mistakes with this machine it makes thousands of varieties of artichoke butter pasta and spicy cajun pasta and Oriental noodles and even soup noodles it’s so easy a child could do it, and there are more urgent voices now, saying _scalpel, turn on the bypass, cannulate the femoral artery, test the line, line pressure is good, gimme a stitch, okay, got the venous line._

I touch the back of my neck with freezing fingertips. My short hair. My thigh. My left arm. I’m here. I’m here. I am here.

I catch new motion, head snapping up, as one of the suits walks toward me. Between the surgical mask and the place where the hood ends at the hairline is a strip of face, just eyes and eyebrows. This strip of human approaches me, his hands held up like he’s about to shove me. But he stops a meter away and pushes his palms toward me. He says “please” in an unsteady voice, his brow rigid, and he motions for me to step back. I didn’t realize that I’d ever stepped forward.

Agent Harding once told me, a little drunk and in deep confidence, that all the agents were instructed never to touch me. Never. Like a piece of unexploded ordnance you accidentally dig up in your garden.

“Well, not unless it’s a medical emergency,” she added.

Don’t they know that’s the worst time to touch me? The most dangerous time? I’ve killed men for touching me in a “medical emergency.”

A monitor beeps. The lines are still flat.

_One degree celsius._

_Oh, God, there’s no way._

_Just keep going. Let’s get this blood moving._

_Should we push epinephrine?_

_No. Not until he’s warmer. Start bypass at two degrees, with a two degree increase every five minutes._

_I got the timer._

One of them sounds like she knows what she’s doing. She directs the others as her instruments play around the incision at the place where his leg meets his pelvis. When she touches him, it’s with a gentle hand, like he can feel it, like he might remember that touch after. He might. I can still remember the touches as I was taken apart and put together again in a new, horrifying shape. I remember every hand that wasn’t brutal, even more than the ones that were.

I don’t know where to look right now. I don’t know the best place or the worst place yet. The monitor makes him look dead, but I also can’t look at the place where they’ve opened him up, or at the tube that carries 67-year-old urine toward a bag hung off the edge of the gurney. When I look past that, at his face, he’s dead still.

Steve Rogers was dead when I woke up in England today. It was another immovable fact, one I’ve made a stale peace with. I travel through my days and barely think of him. I catch sight of him only when I glimpse myself in a window’s reflection, a broad man in that uniform that is in shreds now, shield strapped to his back or readied on an arm. But it’s the wrong arm, the wrong uniform, dark and holstered with weapons Steve would only use in a pinch. It’s the wrong man completely.

I see him in my dreams though, still. I dream of us, as my brain continues to color in gaps in dead space. Sometimes I wake up so disoriented that I’m scared not to see him in a bed next to mine, small and curled up under the blankets, or big and cocooned in a sleeping bag. He seemed always to be there, the best friend I’ve ever known, the brother I always wanted but my mother never gave me.

Hydra made me a man who barely knew him, and after, Peggy asked me to be his legacy. He’s been dead to me for so very long.

I don’t know what I’ll do if he’s not.

The suits keep working, and it becomes easier to track what they’re doing. Up two degrees, up two degrees. I count the time in the warmth of the blood they’re pushing back into him. Four degrees, six degrees, eight, ten. Ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes. The energy has drained from the room, all the urgency retreated as they establish a rhythm. They add more blankets. They glance at the flat lines. They soak his hands in basins of warm water and wrap his feet in warmed towels. From time to time, Hill’s voice calls for an update. I wonder if there are more people in the observation room or fewer, if some of them have wandered to the canteen. Apparently a resurrection is a slow, tedious affair.

But at 21 degrees, there’s a beep.

Heads whip toward the monitor.

_What was that?_

Fury’s voice echoes the same over the speakers.

A single blip, a spike. Nobody moves. Nobody breathes.

Another beep. Another spike.

_Holy shit_

_Should we get—_

_Just wait._

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

 _We got a rhythm_ , she says.

There are cheers. I hear them in the other room, too. I even hear Hill’s voice.

And I’m on the floor, sagged against the wall. Beep, beep, beep. That is the sound of Steve’s heart. And it is beating.

_All right, c’mon people, stay focused, let’s get the EEG._

_Shit, should we get a cervical spine first?_

_Good idea._

They set the x-ray machine and clear the room, urging me to join them as they walk past me and out the door. It slides closed again, and it’s just me and Steve, like so much of our lives. The steady beat of his heart. The gentle hum of the bypass machine. My racing, hungry breaths.

I get a final warning before they take the shot. I want to laugh at the absurdity.

When they pile back into the room, a pair of boots stops next to my leg.

“He’s not gonna wake up for a while.” She pauses, and I feel her looking me over. “Maybe you should take a break.”

“What about the EEG?”

“Look, there’s either something there or there’s not. You being here isn’t gonna make a difference.”

Hill is right. I hate her pragmatism sometimes. But I also want a smoke so bad I could scream. Maybe I need to. Maybe I will.

I nod, and she helps me to my feet.

—

I thrash awake, arms flying out, metal and flesh gripping metal. The frame of a cot. The room rushes to me. My desk. My chair. The door to my bathroom, set ajar a few inches. The wall of windows overlooking a city cast in pale light. A couch I could crash on but rarely do, the one for the visitors I rarely have.

Fury is standing next to the filing cabinet, hands clasped behind his back.

My own hands loosen. I shove one through my hair, a reflex of vanity that no one has been able to condition out of me. I have a watch, but I ask for the time anyway.

“Almost 7:30,” Fury says.

I frown out the window. The light is coming from the ocean. It’s morning again.

“We’re gonna wake him up soon.”

Him. Beep. Beep. Beep. The room lurches, and I press a hand over my clenching chest.

Steve Rogers is in the basement. His heart is alive. His brain is alive. Steve Rogers is alive. I have to remind myself every time I wake up.

“How— what are you gonna do?” I ask.

Fury tells me their plans. My head starts shaking not even four sentences in. Take him to New York. Dress him like SSR. Agent Maddow will dress in one of the old uniforms, uniform services should be able to dig something up. No, no, no. It’s fucking lunacy. I tell him so.

“You got a better idea?”

“Yeah. Anything else. You’re fucking nuts.”

His mouth flattens in the way that it does when I forget he’s my boss. When I forget how much he’s fought for me and mentored me. When he launched me up the ranks when everyone thought he was actually insane for doing it.

“Just… talk to him,” I say. “No bullshit.”

“You wanna be the one doing the talking?”

A hoarse laugh leaps out of me. “Sure. Let’s explode his mind the second he opens his eyes. God, you people are so fucking stupid.”

Fury lets this go, but only because he knows what I know. He knows I’ve been yanked out of ice a lot more indelicately by people who cared a lot less about my mind.

And I try to gather that mind now, frantically. There has to be a way, a good way, a way I would have wanted.

I slide my legs off the edge of the cot and rise to my feet. I look to Fury, a tall, black A-line of authority.

“I’ll pull something together. Just gimme a little time.”

He keeps his eye locked on mine. It’s moments like these that show me what we are when the levels break down, and we are just two men. He’ll defer to me because he’s seeing something in me now, something old and hallowed, a man that both of us respect. Even if he’s just a myth, like Steve used to be.

I stand under the blast of water from the shower head, thinking. It’s been three days since England. Three days of worrying and falling in and out of bouts of troubled sleep as they pulled Steve through the first stages of a long recovery. His body is healing well under heavy sedation. But he hasn’t even begun the real journey, not yet. I’ve started it so many times. It would only be days before my mind would begin to scrabble together a story with pieces lifted from newsstands, from the TV that my team would have on as they cleaned their weapons and played poker with cigarettes. I would begin to assemble the world and my orientation in it. I can never know how many times I started, because any number I could calculate would be dashed away. But sometimes pieces would come with me, even after wipes. I would find them in odd corners of my brain, the voice of Walter Cronkite describing my highest profile assassination; a woman kneeling on the ground and screaming next to a body; an explosion that blasted smoke and vapor into a wide Y across a clear blue sky.

I don’t want Steve to know the world that way. I don’t want him to reel the way I did, for years, when it finally all caught up. But we have to be careful. His stakes, my stakes, are incredibly complex.

I throw on my work clothes. It’s a standard issue SHIELD tactical uniform from the waist-down, bastardized by a dark gray t-shirt I wear instead. Not theirs. Mine. They’re expensive, made from pima cotton. I started it one day and never stopped because nobody told me to. Nobody questioned it. Not to my face, anyway. I strap my sidearm to my thigh and push styling wax into my hair in front of the bathroom mirror. I’ve watched Andre do it a dozen times, but I can never quite make it look the way he does.

I find Harding in her cubicle on the second floor, hammering out a report with Tony-fast keystrokes. We take a silent walk to the coffee kiosk, and I buy her a latte. We find an empty bench in the atrium, echoing with the clicks of heels that swallow our conversation.

“How would you like a temporary clearance upgrade?” I take a sip of my coffee, a bitter abomination composed of a half dozen espresso shots and steamed half-and-half.

Harding’s mouth curls into a smile. “Sure, I’ll take one of those.”

“I need you to come downstairs.”

The weight of that last part eclipses the levity that surrounds her. “For what?”

“I can’t tell you here.”

She lowers her cup and cradles it between her legs. “Why do you want me?”

The question is unusually self-conscious. How do you say that you just like someone? That you just trust them? Not because they act more trustworthy than their colleagues but because you feel it? I probably wage too much on my gut for things like this, but it’s a rare feeling, and so when it comes, I listen.

“You have an easy manner. And I know you won’t do anything too stupid.”

“Wait, can I get that on record?” She pulls her phone from her pocket and tilts it toward my mouth. “I wanna play it for Vanessa next time she calls me a high-strung buzzkill.”

“Say yes and I’ll record anything you want.”

She puts her phone away with a tiny snort. “Of course the answer’s yes.”

We don’t finish our coffees. I lead her to an elevator you can only access from quiet corners of the 15th and 43rd floors. It doesn’t look like an elevator from the outside, just another room with a regular door. Inside is a station manned by whoever got on the shit list this week, forced to be the third and fallible line of authentication. There’s a scurrying sound as the poor agent scrambles to hide whatever he was just doing to kill the time.

He rises as we enter. He’s one rational thought away from throwing up a salute.

“Good morning, sir.”

I nod.

I walk Harding past him to the retinal scanner on the wall. On the LED display, my picture pops up in green, Harding’s in red.

“Sir, Agent Harding isn’t on the access roster.”

“Put her on there, then.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I need a Level 9 authorization for that.”

I clench my teeth. It feels personal, always, when the authority is just one level above mine.

“Then call Hill.”

He blanches a little, but he calls.

“She wants to know why Agent Harding needs access,” he tells me.

“Put her on.”

I negotiate with Hill in a very public conversation about why I need Harding, without disclosing what I need her for, just in case she says no. When she balks, I evoke Fury’s name, tell her it’s the plan, and after presumably conferring with him, she relents and curtly cuts off the line.

When Harding scans in again, she is green.

We descend. Steve is now on sub-level 6, a more secure and even less hospitable place to bring someone into the world again.

“Steve Rogers is alive,” I say to Harding. “They found him in the wreckage of the Valkyrie. They’re waking him up now. I want you to be the first one to talk to him.”

She tenses next to me, sucking in a tight breath through her nose. She’s shocked, she must be, we all are, but she doesn’t show me much of it.

Between floors, I hit the emergency stop button. I talk to her in a low voice, even though we will still be heard by some computer somewhere. I fill her in on some important details and I tell her what to do, like I instruct the agents I train, steady and sure, even though my insides are quaking.

“I trust you not to fuck it up,” I say at the end.

I hit the button to get us moving again, and she exhales. This breath is slow, the kind we train into agents as they are learning to fire a rifle. Breathe in, hold, trigger squeeze, breathe out, hold, trigger squeeze.

“Thank you,” is all she says.

The doors slide open, and we both roll our shoulders back, stepping into the unknown.

Through the monitors, we watch as a nurse stops the flow of phenobarbital into Steve’s body and detaches the tube from the IV line still taped to his forearm. The nurse caps off both ends and casts a glance over his shoulder at Steve, as if he’s concerned that he might leap out of bed any moment, hospital gown floating around him, and drive a fist into his face.

There’s visible relief as he passes through the door to the observation room.

“Okay,” he says to Fury. “It’ll probably be just a few minutes.”

He knows this because they have my dosing charts. They know approximately how many cubic centimeters of meds they must infuse every hour to keep him under, how fast the effects burn off. They have a compendium of medical data on me, I told them to use it all, whatever they need, even if it lets them see some things I don’t want them to. As if most of it isn’t in the public record anyway.

All eyes are on Harding as she fits a small transponder into her ear. Hill and Fury give her a staggered series of orders. They talk about him like he’s a wild animal. Don’t say too much. If he becomes belligerent, clear the room ASAP. Even if he just tries to climb out of bed, get out. There are a pair of guards plastered against the wall of the observation room with stun batons and fat hypodermics of sedatives, just in case.

Harding answers them dutifully as her eyes stay locked onto mine. I think of the briefing I gave her in the elevator. Don’t say too little. Be friendly. Be honest but discreet. Assure him that he’ll get more information soon. Tell him that this is SHIELD and SHIELD is SSR. Tell him about Peggy. Find the places in his well-known biography where you can land meaningful facts.

But don’t say a word about me. Not one fucking word.

“He’s…” She stops. Her glance drifts to Fury and then back. “He’s not gonna go all Jim Crow on me, is he? I mean, if he is, it’s fine. I just wanna know.”

The question wallops me.

“No,” I immediately say. “No. He’s not like that.”

But I make myself look for more. I dig into the shared vault of our memories, the few spots that show up in the light. I try to remember New York in the ‘30s, the strict neighborhood partitions that separated us from them, how we rarely crossed them, as far as I know. I don’t think Steve said much about it. It just wasn’t a star in our constellation of places and people and things back then.

We were in a dump of a bar in what was left of Puenta Antiguo, New Mexico, flush with adrenaline after getting our asses handed to us by a giant fire-belching space robot. Harding needed a drink, badly, and asked if I wanted to join her. Harding, a junior agent not two years out of the academy. Me, SHIELD’s most deadly special operative, her boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. But she didn’t care. I didn’t care. I rarely care about shit like that. And so we drank pissy beers into the night, where she told me about the touching thing. She also told me, even drunker, that she thought the whole Howling Commandos race narrative was horseshit, as if we deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for bravely letting a Black man and a Japanese-American man fight next to us. I wanted to tell her that, at the time, it was a really big fucking deal, opposed up the chain of command and down.

But she was right. That story became horseshit, like so many, as it dragged through time.

“I mean, he might use words that aren’t great,” I add, “but I’d assume best intentions.”

She nods. She strips off her blazer, hands it to me, and fastens her badge above her breast. I know now, even more than I did earlier, that she’s the right choice for this.

“If you get stuck, just do this.” I curl my thumb and middle finger together into a circle, a deliberate kind of gesture that’s less likely to be made out of sheer nervousness. “I’ll help you out.”

She nods again and turns to face the door.

I eye Fury and Hill. They don’t object. Harding crosses to the other side.

“You sure about her?” Hill asks after the door slides closed.

I bristle. I let them both see it. “Positive.”

Harding waits in the chair by Steve’s bedside, hands curving over her pressed-together knees. She watches him closely for any signs of movement. We all do. The flickering of an eyelash, the twitch of a foot. I feel oddly detached, the revival of Steve Rogers just a mission and not a thing I pined for almost perpetually in the early years. A white coat watches the output from Steve’s monitors, looking for clues there. Harding looks into the camera from time to time, and I feel her looking at me. I don’t know if it works, but I wish her something from the store of courage I keep for times like these, when the past and the present smash together with atomic force.

The steady beep of the monitor suddenly changes rhythm, quickening, and we all snap to alertness. I glide my thumb over the push-to-talk button on my radio.

His eyes flutter open. He blinks at the ceiling. Harding’s back straightens. Then his brow furrows, and he winces as he flexes his bandaged fingers. Harding fixes a small smile on her face as he turns his head toward her.

Steve doesn’t leap out of bed. He doesn’t try to reach for her. He doesn’t try to bolt. His gaze passes over her face, down to her badge, and then back to her face again. His mouth opens, but the only thing that comes out is a weak croak. He frowns.

“It’s okay,” Harding tells him softly.

This does not seem to be particularly reassuring. He begins shifting, looking to the door. To his body. To Harding. Back to the door. The rhythm of the beeping accelerates.

“You’re safe, Captain Rogers.”

“Where am I?” He mouths it, mustering only a whisper of sound.

“You’re in Washington, DC, at the headquarters of SHIELD. The Strategic Homeland—” She cuts herself off, shaking her head. “It’s a long, ridiculous name, but we’re the SSR. I’m Agent Alyssa Harding.”

This seems to jiggle something loose for him. His head lifts off the pillow. “I— I don’t—”

I press the button on my radio. “Ask him the last thing he remembers.”

She does. It does the intended trick of anchoring him to something, a task where he has to think.

“I was… with Schmidt. In a plane.”

“Do you remember what happened next?”

He frowns again. He shakes his head. It’s no wonder. There are bruises still healing on his face from wherever he smashed it when the plane went down. I instruct her to tell him what happened, to tell him what became of him.

“The plane crashed in the Arctic. Into the ice. You with it.” She pauses here. I watch her hands, but they stay flat. “And we didn’t find you for a long time.”

“How long?”

I wonder how she’ll phrase it, if she says the date or says the years. They both feel unbearable.

“You were frozen for 67 years. It’s 2012.”

Steve’s eyes go wide. The beeping is frantic now, and the white coat stiffens. He makes the dumbfuck observation that he is agitated, as if we needed a monitor to tell us. To my right, the security guys shift on their feet.

Harding lets him flounder in the knowledge, and I want to tell her to assure him, to tell him it’s okay, it’s okay. I want her to lay a hand on him, to offer him comfort, but he needs to know this. He needs to sit in the eye of it and watch it swirl around him.

“This is SSR?” The muscles in his neck and shoulders and arms flex and release, as if he’s doing a functions check to make sure he still works.

“Yes. SHIELD was founded in 1954 by Peggy Carter and Howard Stark and Chester Phillips.”

“Is she alive?”

“Tell him that she’s happy,” I say urgently. “She’s retired and happy, with a husband and kids.”

I want him to know that last part. I want him to know right now that he still has one person, even if she moved on from him. He would want her to. He’s that kind of guy. I think.

“She’s happily retired with her husband. She has kids. I think some grandkids, too.”

He seems to relax at this, his biceps losing some of their tension. “What about the others?”

Harding’s fingers curl into a circle.

“Tell him that…”

I struggle to phrase it. I know what he wants. He wants his men, the vital lines that tied him to us and us to each other in the very worst and best of times. The times before I was gone. The times after, if hearsay speaks any truth.

“Tell him the remaining Howling Commandos have died. Stark and Phillips, too.”

She tells him. She uses kinder words than I do. They have passed away. Unfortunately. She says that she’s sorry, and she means it. She’s wrapping herself in his world now, imagining herself in it.

But even despite her soft delivery, Steve’s face contorts with pain. She lets him sit with this too, one of many rounds of blows he’ll be facing in the coming weeks.

He doesn’t speak for a while. He shifts his feet, watches them slide beneath the blankets, wincing again.

“Did we win?”

I knew he’d ask this. He would. He always wanted our horrible work to be worth the cost.

“Yeah, we did.”

I feed her the surrender dates, ones I remember clearly from years of reading and re-reading. I tell her to tell him that Hitler blew his brains out, like a fucking coward, as the Allies marched on Berlin.

“How many people died?”

I predicted this, too. I have the number ready. I give it to her.

“Many people. Too many,” she says instead.

Yes. Yes, this is the exact right thing to say. I’m so glad that she knows it better than I do.

“But Germany and Japan are some of our closest allies now,” she adds without prompting. “I went to Japan last year. It’s beautiful. The cherry blossoms in spring are incredible.”

I think he almost smiles at this, his lips tilting a little wistfully, like he’s trying to imagine it.

“What about Hydra?”

My throat clenches. She won’t. She will handle this just as deftly. I trust her with my past. I do. I repeat it to myself.

But still.

She gives him a sour half of a smirk. “They still pop up every now and again. Cut off one head and all that shit.”

Harding rarely swears, but it’s an excellent choice in the moment, a token of alliance. Steve was never the man he’s remembered as, not by the papers, not by the fanboys, not by the historians. In the field, Steve was a grunt like the rest of us, cursing and shitting in the ground and smoking cigarettes and joining in very blue conversations about women that make me want to bury myself in a hole now.

Steve doesn’t say anything. He’s staring up at the ceiling again, his expression unreadable.

“But we never found Schmidt’s body.”

We all perk up at this. It’s a sophisticated move in its understatement, the kind of easy slip into debriefing that most agents take advanced courses to learn. Hill and Fury see it too. I hope they remember it. I hope they remember her.

“You won’t find it,” Steve murmurs.

“Why’s that?”

“He just…” He makes a gesture with his hand, a weak flick, palm up.

And I guess that’s the first piece of intel we get, even if we don’t know what he means. Fury and Hill exchange a look. I know they want her to press, ask about the gesture, and I hope that she doesn’t. There will be so much time for that later.

“Alright, call it,” I tell her.

“Okay,” she says. “Maybe we should stop here for now.”

Steve looks to the camera on the wall. “Who’s watching?”

I stiffen.

“The bigwigs,” she says simply. “The director. His name is Nick Fury.”

Steve snorts. Harding laughs.

“I know, right?”

I hear a sound from Fury, a rough-edged, indignant chuckle. I wonder if he knows all the jokes about him that vibrate around the office. But it’s a stupid question. Of course he knows.

“Tell him that he should try to get some rest,” I say. “There will be plenty of time for more questions later.”

Once again, I expect an interjection from Fury or Hill. Not yet. Get more out of him. But they are both quiet, watching Harding on the screen with a calm sort of regard that might be verging on respectful.

Harding smiles at Steve sympathetically. “I know this is a lot. And I promise you'll get more information later. But you’ve been through so much, and you should get some more rest.”

“No more drugs,” he says, looking to the abandoned IV stand beside the bed.

Harding looks to the camera. She wants to give him an honest answer.

“What do I tell her?” I ask Fury.

He looks to the white coat, who shrugs. Fury looks to Hill, who tilts her head. Nobody seems to know what to do with him now.

“I’m not gonna run,” Steve says. “Where am I gonna go?”

It’s a good point. It could also be bullshit. I would have given that line a thousand times if it could buy me even a chance of an escape. But Steve, though an idiot in some respects, isn’t stupid like that. He must know the force between him and any door to the outside world. He must know how weak he is. He must know he has no chance.

Or maybe I just don’t remember him right. Maybe he is that stupid. He did come for me, after all, singlehanded. A mighty fucking fool.

“Tell him okay,” I decide, when nobody else will. I’ll take our chances with his blind idiocy.

She does. A shiver courses through him that he’s too weak to suppress. I know the feeling deeply, when the ice still feels like it’s clinging to your bones. When even ten blankets feel as insubstantial as squares of tissue paper.

“You still cold?” Harding asks.

He doesn’t reply.

She lays her hand on the edge of the mattress, next to his shoulder. “We’ll get you some more blankets. Anything else before I go?”

He closes his eyes. Shakes his head.

“Okay. We’ll see you later.”

He doesn’t nod. He doesn’t make a sound. The beeping on the monitors doesn’t slow. He’s awake. He’s here, and he’s playing dead again. He’s here, and he just had a full and real conversation with Harding.

“How was that?” she asks when the door closes behind her.

“Not too bad, Agent Harding,” Fury replies.

Hill keeps her arms crossed but she gives her approval with a nod. She’s smiling, or as close to smiling as she gets.

And now Harding is looking for my answer. The gravity of the conversation rests heavy on her face, a faint crease of worry on her forehead, her hands tight at her sides.

I check the monitor again, just as Steve’s eyes slide open. He looks into the camera. He looks into me. And I— I don’t know how to do this part. I never planned for this. I never dared to wish it into life, because I knew it would only bring me pain. And I was done with longing for the dead people and the dead world behind me.

This is a different kind of pain from the one in my shoulder now, as the skin frays around the place where it meets metal. It’s a pain of my reality crashing into this, into Steve Rogers. Alive. Drifting back into my life as I begin to drift out of it.

I lay my hand on Harding’s shoulder, give it a single squeeze.

Then I turn and walk out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nerd note: Some sources indicate that Steve Rogers was unthawed in 2011. However, the definitive date of the Battle of New York was May 4, 2012, and I'm pretty sure he wasn't out of ice for that long before the Chitauri invasion. Thus, I’ve pegged it as the month prior to the date of the invasion in the MCU, which seems closer to what was implied in the TFA end credits and Avengers 1 plus deleted scenes.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.
> 
> \--------------

It’s so easy tonight that I don’t even have to try. One moment the barstool next to me is empty, the next there’s a girl in it. Our eyes meet politely, and I give her a smile.

This smile is a very particular one that I adopted around 1993. I distinctly remember when I took ownership of it. It’s a smile I have watched in the mirror, played out like an actor, just to see how it looked. It might have been a smile I learned or re-learned, I can never be sure. I don’t have a lot of collateral information about what I used to be like. Nothing honest, anyway. Just a bloated sack of hero worship and pity that I take an axe to whenever I get the chance.

By the sixth month after the hospital, I had become a chronic wanderer. I walked every borough in New York like a lost tourist, looking for any signs that I knew the place at all, cataloging twitches of memories and visceral sensations in hopes that I’d assemble it all into a shape of Bucky Barnes, one that I could slip back on like an old, comfy robe. I was still so fucking stupid back then. I honestly thought I would just find myself, if I only looked hard enough.

But I learned a lot that first year back in the world. I was an excellent student of human behavior, a keen observer. I always have been, I’m pretty sure of that. It was also the year that I started drinking again. Not because it got me drunk, it rarely does, but because drinking made other people so easy around me. I liked that. I wanted to remember that. I also remembered that I liked the feel of a stranger’s shoulders brushing mine. I remembered that I liked to flirt. I remembered the thrill of it, the thing I was coming to rediscover as ‘fun.’ I floated in and out of bars, where I re-learned how to flirt with women and I learned-learned how to flirt with men. The latter was so much easier than I thought it would be, not that I ever imagined it much before. It was so easy to get laid, even in the middle of a devastating gay sex epidemic. I fucked back then with embarrassing frequency. Because I could. Because I was free.

The girl orders her drink with an air of second year law school confidence, her chin high, her motion to the bartender decisive.

“Put it on my tab,” I say to Keith as he brings her whiskey sour. “I’ll take one, too.”

“Why, thank you,” she says. There’s a slight accent on the ‘a,’ something upper midwestern, maybe Minnesota or one of the Dakotas.

She introduces herself as Lindsay, and then her head tilts to the side. She points at me with her drink. “Are you—”

Are you Captain America? Why, yes I am. You must live an exciting life. Oh yes, it’s very exciting. What’s the shield really made of? That’s a state secret, sorry. Does your arm feel weird? Nope, just like homemade.

“Yeah, I thought so,” she says, recognizing me. “My friend told me to watch out for you.”

“Oh yeah? Why?”

“She said you never called.”

I snort. I could stuff a twin mattress with all the numbers I get on napkins and the backs of movie ticket stubs.

She makes a small _hmph_ , and for a moment, I think she might blow me off, write me off as some sad old man who trolls the bars of Georgetown to pick up coeds. She wouldn’t be very wrong.

But we keep talking. She’s pretty and intensely intelligent. American University, International Economic Relations. We converse about recent world events in rapidly shifting English and French and German, testing wits to see who will screw up first. I let myself misconjugate a German adjective. It’s a letting, when I mess this kind of thing up. She lays her hand on my knee and laughs. She squeezes it with a familiar affection, and I laugh, too.

Maybe she’s not about to be a lawyer, but her mommy or daddy must be, because she has her own apartment a few blocks down. In bed, she pushes my head between her legs, and I bury my face in her pussy, hungry and eager and blissfully drowning in her until she comes. Then she tells me to get on my back and straddles me, completely self-possessed, and I wonder if she was imagining this back at the bar, if maybe she planned it out before we even started talking, wooing Captain America with her admirable linguistic skills and then taking him home and making him service her. I mean, what a plan. What a rush. Not that a single part of me minds. The whole thing is obscenely sexy. She rides me hard, chasing her own pleasure and daring me to keep up. And I do. I’m good at this. She uses me to come again, but I can’t quite hold out for a third time, so she finishes herself and pats my chest with her delicate hands and tells me that it’s all right. She is refreshingly easy about everything. She doesn’t ask me to hold her after or ask about my past or my job or my love life. She doesn’t brush her fingers over my cheek or my arm like I’m some wounded creature that only she could understand, if I just let her. I lie naked on her lavender bedspread, resting my head on my bent arm, resting everything in me for the first time in nearly two weeks. I admire her as she walks around, also still naked, picking up the clothes I threw on the floor earlier, completely unselfconscious about her fat rolls and her heavy breasts and her dimpled thighs. She tells me about her master’s program, and I listen with genuine interest as she charts for me the course of her life. Here and then off to Brussels, or maybe to the UN, or maybe to Rand. There are so many possibilities for her.

Lindsay throws me out a little before two with an apology about having class at ten. I don’t get the sense that she’s very sorry at all, and the smile I give her as I duck out of her room is a real one. I deem it a fine night and replay it fondly as I walk back to my apartment. The weight of her breasts in my hands. The loud, shameless sounds she made. The taste of her. The smell of her pillow. The feeling of something out of sorts clicking into place.

My apartment is nothing like hers. There are no rooms to hide in except for the bathroom, no places that the lights don’t touch. I flip all the locks, set the alarm, and toss my keys into the bowl on the counter. I load up a playlist from the docked iPod in my stereo and fill the space with sound. I’ll start with a cycle of songs from the 90s, pop hits that Tony describes as “inexcusable” but which ushered me back into the world. Later, I will move back a decade, then another, until I fall into bed to something wordless. Classical, maybe. Something that never quite seems to age. As it plays, I wander the room and press my finger into the soil of six potted orchids. The Phalaenopsis needs water. It’s such a greedy bastard, always thirstier than the rest.

Most days this is enough to center me. My routine is a rigorous one, carved and re-carved through years of trials. There had to be a counterbalance to the life I live during the day, a rock of constancy I could arrange the chaos around. Most days, this is enough.

But this is not most days. This is not a crisis of international terror or the immense tedium of too many meetings. This is the fabric of space time being pulled apart. This is Steve alive, his hands healed, his feet steady, his questions unrelenting.

Poor Harding. I’ve been hoisting her from her workstation and dragging her to the basement for five days now, and Steve is starting to get suspicious. He’s restless and serious. He’s getting strong again. He won’t abide it for much longer. Not even meeting Fury was enough to settle him.

He is ready for the world, but we are not ready for him. I’m not, anyway.

But all good things force themselves into an end. I know tomorrow has to be the day.

So I don’t sleep, even though I’m exhausted. Chopin doesn’t pull me under. He only scores my worries about what I will say, how I will explain my existence at all, let alone in this configuration. I sometimes try to imagine what I would do if our positions were reversed, what my mind would do, and I find that I don’t have to try very hard.

I roll out of bed eventually and go for a run. I shouldn’t, because it chews down my muscles breathtakingly fast. I can almost hear Tony screaming at me. But I need it. I need the steady pound of my own feet beneath me. I need to cut through the predawn air and take it into myself. I need to figure this out. Time is not on my side.

—

Before heading to the office, I suddenly find many errands that feel very urgent. I stop at the bodega for cigarettes and smoke four in a row, back pressed against the side of a Dunkin Donuts with a rapidly cooling coffee in my hand. I stop at the gas station and put five dollars worth of fuel in the car. Every stop brings me a little closer to work, until there are no more stops to make.

I grab a latte at the kiosk and bring it up to Harding. When she sees me standing in the doorway to her cubicle, she gives me a tired smile and starts saving files on her desktop. It hits me then, as it hasn’t in the past few days, that I am a total asshole, a selfish coward. How could she say no to me? She wouldn’t. Not with my rank, not with the gravity of the task I’ve assigned her.

“Wait, wait, wait.”

She does.

“I’m gonna go alone today.”

Her lips purse. “Did I do something to—”

“No. You’ve been great. You really have.”

I hand her the latte, and she sets it on her desk untasted. She seems slow to convince, but it’s absolutely true. The first day was child’s play compared to the next four. She’s fielded Steve’s irritation, his mounting demands for information, and his increasingly belligerent requests to be let out, even after he was moved to a slightly homier room under the courteous escort of a full STRIKE team. She asked him things we wanted to know, my voice in her ear, until he shut down and said he was done answering questions, no offense, you seem like a nice person. But.

“It’s time for me to step in,” I tell her.

Harding sits back in her chair and crosses her arms over her chest. For as much as we work together, as many times as I’ve handpicked her to support my missions, I’m not sure she knows a lot about me. I’m not sure if she knows what seeing Steve again means to me. And that’s a tough one, because even I’m not sure of it. I don’t know if she knows how close we were, the couple of fucking rejects we were, the little sick kid and the ethnic mutt, two odd shapes bound together with a cord of wire that wound around thicker with every year. I don’t think she knows how scared I am to go down there alone.

If I can’t bring her, I want to find the place in myself that is like her. The part that knows what to say and the right voice to say it in. The part that is dignified and earnest. I wonder if these parts are even in me at all, even a facsimile of them.

I can tell she wants to ask me more, but she can’t here. And I don’t want to drag her to a place where she can.

“You wanna grab some drinks later?” She mouths this silently. She loves that she can do it and that I will understand. “You might need it.”

Thank God she asked. I couldn’t ask. I should never ask for anything from her again.

“Yes. Please,” I murmur.

“Can I bring Vanessa?”

It will guarantee that we can’t talk what little shop is fit for public consumption. That’s probably a good thing. I can’t imagine the burden of hiding this from someone you love, coming home every day and pretending like you didn’t just field unending, sometimes unanswerable questions from a very alive and cranky Captain America on behalf of the entirety of SHIELD, because I’m too weak to do it myself.

“Of course.”

She takes a drink of her latte and makes a small, satisfied sound. “It always tastes better when a Level 8 brings it to me.”

I huff, the sound like an opening pressure valve. “All right. I’ll leave you to it.”

“You got this,” she assures me. “Just be honest.”

Her words reverberate through me as I take the long way to the elevator, leisurely walking my way up 41 sets of stairs when the 15th floor felt too soon. I feel an odd pressure in my chest somewhere around the 30th floor, a sensation I only usually encounter after the tenth mile of my annual treadmill stress test. It might just be the anxiety crushing down on me, because it doesn’t let up even as the elevator doors slide closed. I clear my throat and will the whole thing to slow, to suddenly stutter and stall, for the whole power grid and backup generators to go offline. Anything to stop this descent.

Hill is there when I arrive, watching the monitors quietly from a chair in the corner. There are two feeds now, wide angles that cover the much larger room. There’s a real bed and a table with two chairs now. A door leading to a bathroom with a shower. A stack of books sit in the middle of the table, untouched from when they were placed there 18 hours ago. They asked me what I thought they should give him, nothing too stimulating or revealing. I recommended _To Kill a Mockingbird,_ _Notes of a Native Son,_ _On the Road, Catch-22_ , some of the first books I read when I could have them again. It’s a small handful of so many I’ve accumulated over the years, reading my free hours away with a Webster’s Dictionary open on the side table, filling notebooks with things I liked, things I didn’t understand, things I wanted to know. Someone joked that we should give him _1984,_ _Fahrenheit 451_ , or _Brave New World_ , just to see if he thought they were real. I didn’t find it funny. They settled on _The Call of the Wild, The Hobbit,_ and _The Great_ _Gatsby,_ why even bother asking me at all, if they weren’t going to take a single goddamn piece of my advice.

Steve is currently walking the room in pieces of the same tactical uniform I wear. Black pants and a white t-shirt to make sure he can’t pass for STRIKE if he decides to make a break for it. They gave him socks, but he doesn’t wear them. And they didn’t give him any shoes, as if that would ever stop him from doing what he can do. He’s feeling the walls, knocking on them, pressing his fingers into the drywall. I can’t tell if it’s a threat or curiosity, and perhaps that’s the point. He glances into the cameras every now and again, just to let us know that he knows he’s being seen doing these things. It’s a little menacing. His eyes send my heart racing.

“How is he?” I ask Hill, pointlessly.

“I think he’s about to become a real problem. I’m glad you’re going in.”

She fits me with comms but doesn’t give me any instruction except to be careful. I don’t even find the remark insulting, because I will have to be. I have no idea how he will react. For as many times as I ran simulations of this moment, I have never found a version that even touched the fringes of reality.

I watch him for a while, the methodical way he tests the space. It’s suddenly and extremely familiar. I’ve done this. Before I learned not to, I did this as well.

“How’s the refit going?” I murmur.

“Good. We’ve got 60 percent of the fleet upgraded now.”

I do not need to know this. I only care about stealth flight systems when they don’t work and our people get blown out of the sky.

“You stalling?” she asks.

“Yeah. I guess.”

I force my joints to unlock, taking a heavy step forward and then another, until I’m staring down the sliding door.

I wait for him to drift to the far edge of the room, furthest from me, and I nod.

It slides open.

I come in at an angle, a sharp one, keeping my face out of his line of sight in one last ditch effort to delay what’s happening. I hear his footfalls cease as the door slides closed. My hands clench and unclench, my lungs half-full.

I turn.

Steve sees me.

It’s strange to watch his mind externalized. The way his lips part, the gathering of his eyebrows. He stares at me for what feels like minutes. I don’t breathe. I don’t move a muscle. I’m afraid of what will happen if I do. I’m afraid that I’ll give myself away, some piece I’m not ready to lose yet you can’t fool Miss Cleo the cards never lie call me now for your free—

I jerk my head to shake her voice away.

Steve starts to move but not at all the way I expect him to. His head whips toward the camera, glaring, his upper lip snagged into a snarl. His feet fall hard on the floor as he strides toward it. He could reach it, all it would take is a little jump, and he’d do whatever he feels compelled to do now. I don’t know if he’s planning to yell into the camera or tear it off the wall or rip a hole in the room with his bare hands.

“Get out of there,” Hill says in my ear.

I don’t. I speak.

“Hey, hey— Steve. Stop.”

The broad muscles of his back ripple and lock him into place. He’s a bullet paused in mid-air.

“Look at me,” I say, even though I really don’t want him to.

His eyes have gone wide, chest rising and falling fast. Mechanically, though, he’s still completely stalled out. I grasp now, too slowly, what he thinks this is. He thinks this is some production, like the one they were first planning for him, where maybe they’ve spent all these days digging up some Bucky Barnes lookalike who could even voice the part. And why would he think it’s me? Dead just two minutes ago and now seemingly here but older, and not in any way that the math lines up. I’ve only aged two decades and aged pretty damn well, if I do say so.

But still. This me is not his me.

I take a step forward.

“It’s me. It’s not bullshit. It’s me.”

When Steve turns his head, it’s forced, like every muscle and tendon is fighting him on it. His jaw ticks. There seems to be some debris still lodged in the gears.

I move in, careful, my flesh hand stretched out in front of me like I’m feeling for furniture in the dark. Steve’s glance darts from my face to my feet to my hand, all the places a threat might come from.

He’s quiet as his eyes land on mine. I wonder if those look different to him, too.

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“Tell me something,” he whispers, “only he would know.”

Shit. This is not a game I’m good at. Tell me something _he_ would know? I’ve been trying to know him for almost seven decades, and I’m still struggling. Sometimes I can’t even tell what I remember and what history has remembered for me.

There must be something, though, some anecdote I can scrape out of the mush of my brain. I crash down the hallways of my memories, trying to land at any place familiar enough to weave it into a story. It’s mostly fragments, flashes of people, my _mame_ squishing salt into ground meat with her bare hands, my sister squealing as I tickle her, a barrage of shells ripping through my men, their falling guts. These are my memories, though. They would not be Steve’s.

But something begins to materialize: a building, children, a chapel they made us kneel in with folded hands, figures in black ghosting through rows of chairs.

Harding’s words come to me. Just be honest. And so I try.

“Once this kid— I can’t remember his name. O’Donnell, O’fuckingsomething, I don’t know. He shit his pants, at least a little, and he kept blaming it on you, the smell— and you kept saying, no, no, I didn’t do it, it’s you, you stupid fuck, I don’t know if you said that last part, but I thought it, he was so fucking stupid he didn’t think we’d notice that it was only when he was around, and Sister— God, they all have the same fucking name, Sister Mary Idunno, the one with that hairy mole, right here.” I point to my left cheek. “She walked by his desk and she...” I make a face, her face, I see it so clearly now, curled and disgusted, she was young and so terribly ugly and mean, I might be saying this part too, I don’t even know anymore. “And she made him stand up and walk to the front, and he had a shit stain on his pants, we could all fucking see it, but he still tried to—”

There’s a sharp sound, breath pushing out past a tight throat, the kind that would come from a well-squared kidney punch. Steve’s brows are unsteady now, flinching together, relaxing, flinching again. His mouth does the same kind of thing, he’s remembering too, he’s seeing that mole on her face, maybe even seeing my face in the desk just two over from him, however I looked back then.

Steve breathes my name. It’s been so horribly long since I’ve heard it spoken aloud.

When I take more steps, they don’t feel forced. Steve is a magnet, and I am the charge that binds to him, that is already bound to him. His eyes are searching me fiercely now, glimmering with recognition, and not like Lindsay seeing Captain America in the dark of a bar but like Steve Rogers, seeing _me_. Proving me to the universe.

“Bucky…”

His face begins to crumple as he closes the distance between us, and I hold my arms out reflexively as he throws his around me. He smells like government soap, and he lets out rough bursts of air against my shoulder and neck. _Oh my God_ , he says, _Oh my God_ … His voice is thick. His body is large and warm under my hands as I hold him back.

But then he stiffens again, and I do too. He pulls away, and I can feel the solid grip of his hand as it presses against the shoulder he just had his face shoved into. He squeezes, lightly at first, then with the force of his entire strength.

“What the fuck is this? What the—”

He can’t finish the sentence. His eyes sharpen, still a little wet, as something like horror dawns on his face.

“It’s just an arm.” I flex it, the plates constructing my bicep shifting. “It’s fine,” I try to assure him.

Steve’s fingers are digging under the collar of my jacket, feeling around. I shrug it off to assuage him and shuck the glove off my hand.

It all drops to the floor, and Steve takes two very pointed steps back, his jaw slack.

“What— what happened to you?” The horror on his face deepens. “What _happened_ to you? How the fuck are you even here?”

This is a line I’ve practiced well. I almost deliver it naturally.

“I got hurt when I fell. I got some shit serum like you got when I was in Austria, so… Got a new arm. SHIELD found me, brought me in. Been working here ever since.”

It’s only five sentences, thoughtfully selected biographical pit stops on a long and harrowing road, if presented slightly out of order. The words are designed to stagger, and they do. It’s entirely too much for him to handle right now. Steve cups his hands to his face, huffs into his palms. He’s scrapping for control, like he both needs it desperately and wants to let it drop onto the floor next to my clothes. Maybe drop his entire body down with it.

“Can I ask something?” he says into his own skin.

“Yeah. Of course.”

He lowers his hands just enough to look at me over the tops of his fingers. He hesitates. He tries to speak and aborts mid-sentence, _Did— Did I—_ until he finally forces it out.

“Did I die?”

It feels like a simple question at first — did my heart stop, did the doctors bring me back. But then I realize that he’s asking if he’s still dead, if I am too, if this is all some bizarre fuckery of the afterlife.

“You’re alive. I’m alive. This is real.” I’m sure of that now.

He covers his face again, shaking, and then lets out a single sob. My hands find his shoulders and I squeeze them, maybe I can be a rock he can arrange himself around now. I’ll be that. I’ll be anything for this man right now.

His hands drop to his sides and then shift to his knees as he bends over. He lets out a ragged sound and swallows hard.

“Yeah, feels like shit, huh?” I say.

All those Hydra assholes never appreciated how hard it is to come out of ice and be tossed into time again. How taxing it is on the body. How the mind and the flesh conspire to shut everything down, white out the world, to find that oblivion again, the only equilibrium it knows.

Steve groans his agreement and sways a little. I guide him toward the edge of his bed and sit down beside him. I glide my hand over his bent back as he gulps and swallows back a nausea I know too well.

“It’s okay,” I say, over and over. I’m fully ready for him to throw up right between his bare feet, but he doesn’t. I get the sense that this is an accomplishment.

I feel his touch then, his hand clasping around my calf. He rubs his thumb hard over my shin, more testing to make sure that I’m here, that I’m made of something solid.

He pushes himself upright, slowly, his hand sliding up my leg in a lazy, careless way. It stays on my thigh, and we sit like that for a while, quietly, the only sound a fleeting hum of static I hear in my right ear, maybe Hill about to say something but deciding against it.

“I don’t wanna be here anymore,” Steve says to me.

“Okay. Yeah, we’ll— I think you can go soon. This is kind of a thing, if you haven’t noticed.”

There hasn’t been a press release yet. I don’t know if they’ll be proactive or reactive, if they’ll wait until someone snaps a picture of him and posts it on Facebook with a trail of question marks and exclamation points.

“I noticed,” Steve says. “I don’t like it.”

“I know.”

I’m smiling, because this feels so fantastically like Steve. Pigheaded and self-determined, rough edges that I learned how to poke through to find a more thoughtful person, a deeply feeling person, good hearted and immense, always more immense than any frame could ever hold.

“So, where do you live?”

It feels effortful to divert down such a mundane road, but I’m glad he does it. I don’t want to answer anything difficult, not when I’m such a thin bag of rattling pieces right now.

“Here in DC.”

“And… where would I live?” The way he asks it is childlike.

I shrug. “Wherever you want. You can live anywhere.”

He nods vaguely.

“You can stay with me for a while, until you figure out what you want to do.”

This was definitely not part of my plan. I’m ad-libbing, saying things I deliberately told myself not to. Don’t be stupid. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t give invitations you’ll regret.

But I don’t feel that urgency now. All of my caution withers in the light of the man next to me. I can’t imagine Steve alone in some safehouse, even a nice one. I’ve been in them before, countless apartments and estates and homes over the years. They are a special kind of soul-crushing.

“I’d like that.” Steve stops then, abruptly, like a rabbit startled upright by a crack of gunshot. “Jesus, how _are_ you?”

I laugh aloud at the sincerity of the question. “Fine. I’m doing fine.”

“Good. God, I’m so glad.”

His gaze intensifies as he looks me over. He pauses around my head, and his face sours.

“What?”

“Your hair.”

I touch it again, as I still do so many times a day. “You like it?”

“You look like a Nazi.”

I am immediately and intensely offended. A hot streak of anger enervates me.

But Steve doesn’t know what was found as the war drew to a close. He can’t begin to imagine the scope of the atrocities. We knew so little then. And, in fairness, I was never a very good Jew. Only my dick and my mother gave me away most of the time, along with the smells from our kitchen and the candles we lit that nobody else in the neighborhood did. I certainly didn’t enter the war as a Jew, my dog tags proof of my Catholicism. But I left it as one.

We heard about the camps only in dark rumors from the Russians spoken in a dark briefing room below the streets of London. It was one of those things people like Steve probably didn’t dare entertain too long, because it was safer to regard it as hearsay from a questionable source. _That can’t be true_ , he murmured one night in our tent, _can it_? But I knew it could be. I knew it probably was. My _mame_ made sure I knew about her people. And so I quietly channeled those people — my people — into myself, from Poland to the rolling green mountains of Lithuania that birthed my grandparents. I became them as I blew out Nazi brains onto white snow. I became the six million who had not yet even been counted. I’m not sure where they all went when I died the first time.

“Yeah, you wanna walk that back a few feet?” I say, measuring my words.

His eyebrows rise almost comically high. “Sorry. Shit, I’m so sorry.”

I let it slide through me and evaporate into the cool air of the room. Just below the power plays and the pacing and the unspoken threats, Steve is a hot fucking mess. I see it now. I should have anticipated it before. I should have better remembered how frail I always was, even in violent motion, even executing my missions with precision.

“It’s called an undercut, and I’ll have you know it’s very fashionable now.”

Steve snorts.

“I guess just consider it ironic,” I mutter, “if you don’t like it.”

Steve looks suddenly exhausted. The toll of every word is palpable. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

“It’s fine. Not important.”

Steve’s head tilts back. He scrubs his free hand over his face and passes it through his hair.

“I feel so messed up right now,” he tells me.

“I get it. I do. You’ll get there.”

His fingers tighten around my thigh. The other grips the edge of the bed. “You gotta get me out of here. I’m going crazy.”

“Okay.” I give his hand a pair of pats with my own. “Just hold your horses for a little while longer, okay?”

He doesn’t have much of a choice, a fact that seems to be settling on him, dragging him to defeat.

“Will you stay for a while?” he asks, almost shy.

“Of course.”

He looks me up and down, stuttering at the intricate plating of my arm before settling on my face.

“I just can’t believe you’re here,” he says.

Maybe some of Steve’s dislocation is bleeding into me, because I feel myself beginning to float a little. It’s a pleasant sensation. I smile.

“I could say the same for you, pal.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

Deep in the bowels of access tunnel four, I wait outside the car, pacing and chain smoking, tossing my butts to the ground like a prick, leaving a trail that traverses the entire length of the vehicle. I scowl at my watch. They’re late. My nerves are making me cranky. My stomach has been in revolt all day as I tried to busy myself with errands, collecting the things Steve might need. He was colossally unhelpful when I asked him what he wanted. He could barely think of what to even request. We lived such rough, dirty lives in those last years, bathing our smelly parts with ice cold stream water and maybe squeaking in a shave every few days using tiny, perpetually dirty mirrors and too-blunt razors. The couple things Steve asked for no longer exist, leaving it up to my shitty memory and my best guessing to find a suitable replacement. I stocked my kitchen with the most familiar foods I could think of and collapsed on the new sleeper-sofa Macy’s delivered yesterday. Sleep was impossible. I can’t remember my last full night of rest.

My head snaps in the direction of an approaching set of headlights, and I suck down one more puff before tossing the butt to the ground with the rest. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I guess I’ll just stand here like an idiot. No other way to do it.

The car parks, and Steve swings out of the front passenger seat. He looks weary but energetic, like the kind of pre-mission exhilaration that slices through exhaustion like a knife.

Steve gives Hill a wave and slams the door.

I feel my face cock into a half-smile. He’s got a small gym bag in his hand, hopefully filled with at least a few pairs of underwear. I blanked out completely there. I had no idea what to get him. I’ve seen him in shorts and I’ve seen him in briefs, and I have no clue which ones he actually likes.

He stops in front of me, glancing to the butts on the ground, taking a whiff of the air around me.

“You got any left?”

The request is pleasantly surprising. “Yeah, yeah. Totally.”

I feel around the pocket of my jeans and wedge out the pack of Pall Malls that’s almost gone already. I pull two and light them both in my mouth at the same time, then hand one to him.

His eyes are a little wide when he takes it. And yes, it was a stupid thing to do. I never used to do that, another artifact from my lost year of sport fucking. Some guy did it for me once, and I found the gesture intensely intimate but not aversive. I suppose Steve and I _are_ intimate, even if not like that. How much more do you need to go through with someone before you call it intimacy?

Steve thanks me and smokes it leisurely. He doesn’t have the ravenous hunger for them that I do, bumming one only after a particularly chaotic brush with death or while aching with boredom.

“Is she just gonna watch us?” Steve asks, jerking his head over his shoulder at Hill.

“Yep.”

Hill won’t drive off until she can’t see our lights anymore. Then a tail and the satellite grid will take over, tracing our drive through the city, looking for unusual surges of speed or places where we’re stopped too long. I was instructed to take him immediately to my place, which is fine by me.

Steve is staring at me, his head shaking a little. “I still can’t believe this.”

I know the feeling. I wonder when it will ever stop pummeling me, seeing him alive.

“You’ve been dead for a long time,” I say.

It’s a comment that comes from the surface of me, like a strip of molting skin. I marvel at how little I feel it right now. How little I’ve felt it for so long. Below the superficial dazzle of Steve Rogers, here and shiny and alive, I don’t find much underneath. I wonder if it all rotted somewhere along the way, too terrifying to be touched, until it just dried out into a limp shell from neglect. Other things did that inside me, with enough time.

“Sorry.”

I shrug. “Not much you could have done about it.”

“I dunno. Maybe I could have.”

“Like what?”

“I just panicked.” He takes a deep drag off his cigarette. “I didn’t know what to do. My brain just— Peggy told me to try to land it but—”

I laugh. “You? Land a plane? Full of bombs? On ice? You can barely even keep a car on a straight road.” I love Peggy, I do, but what a crock of shit.

“I guess that’s one way to look at it.” The minute smile creasing his lips falls. His thumb flicks too many times across the butt of his smoke. “You know, you were dead for a while, too.”

It’s delivered almost like a joke, a rejoinder, but his gaze falls to the concrete. His chin crinkles, a little spasm, but he pushes it out with a forward shove of his jaw. Steve looks away from me then, and I hear him sniff.

This is what I was afraid of, but I suppose there’s no real way around it. He misses that man he just saw a few weeks ago. Not this guy, this strange time traveler, this Bucky Barnes Version 6.3.

“Sorry. I know you’re real. I know you’re him.”

“No, I’m not. I get it. I am, and I’m not.”

He gives a single, shallow nod as I put to words something that he’s probably been too afraid to utter.

“God, I missed you. I—” Steve’s voice is thick, like it was when he first recognized me, really saw me. “I didn’t know what to do.”

I didn’t know what to do, either.

He tosses his cigarette to the ground. I do too. I’m starting to feel sick.

He looks like he wants to ask me something else. I hope, as I’ve been hoping, as I will probably continue to hope, that it’s nothing I can’t answer now.

“Can we just go?” he says.

“Yeah, of course.”

The tunnel is long and mostly underwater. It will eventually spit us out on Parkway Drive, just on the other side of the Delaware from the Triskelion. It’s well lit, giving Steve no cover to hide his face, to hide from me the sight of him dragging his knuckles over his eyes.

“I’m sorry.” He sniffles again, a wet sound. “I don’t know why...”

My mind scrambles to fill in the rest. I don’t know why I’m crying. I don’t know why you don’t feel like him. I don’t know why you feel so far away, because you’re right here.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s stupid. Stupid.” He shakes his head in the rough, angry way I do when I’m trying to knock away the voice of Miss Cleo or the Encyclopedia Britannica guy or Suzanne Somers telling me how I can squeeze, squeeze my way to shapely thighs.

It’s not stupid. I think to tell him that, but I can’t imagine that it will land. I would give anything to be that Bucky for him. I would give anything to be that person who I was told was warm and genuine. A more reassuring person. An unselfish person. I stopped trying to be these things so long ago. It was just too painful to keep failing at it.

We pass through the manned gate at the tunnel’s mouth. They wave us through, giving me a nod as the gate arm lifts. Or maybe they’re nodding at Steve. It’s hard to tell.

His eyes trail over the dashboard, to the digital displays of our speed and fuel level.

“This car is something else,” he says.

It’s actually a pretty big piece of shit, not anything that I would choose for myself. But it’s a free piece of shit, and Fury gets twitchy if I drive anything else.

“Does it fly? Howard promised us all flying cars by now.”

I laugh. “He did? When?”

There’s a long beat of silence then. “You don’t remember?”

I can tell from his voice that this is a big thing and that my not remembering it is deeply disappointing, maybe even hurtful.

“I got knocked around a lot.” I gesture to my head. “My memory’s not great. There are... gaps.”

There’s an audible swallow, and Steve’s head ducks. His hands fidget on his lap.

“It was right before you left,” he tells me. “There was an exposition. Howard showed off a car that almost flew.”

“Huh.” I think, dimly, that I would have really liked to see that.

“And you said, ‘holy cow.’” My words are delivered to me as an imitation, the voice of someone quietly awestruck and not a little cheesy about it.

“Well, this car doesn’t fly, but it’s armored.” My metal hand _tinks_ as I tap the window next to me. “Bulletproof glass. I’m a high value target. Now you are, too. Again.”

A tiny puff of air pushes through Steve’s nose. “Well, you’re Captain America, not me.”

I didn’t expect him to be so pleased when I told him, or that he would interrogate me for nearly an hour about the equipment and my uniform and how I liked it and what kinds of missions they sent me on and could he try out my shield some time. His enthusiasm was brilliant, so I accommodated. I chose not to tell him that I find the Cap gig annoying more than anything, that it’s a side hustle to my real work as an administrator, that nobody really buys into it anyway, that I’m just a knockoff Steve Rogers, and a pretty low quality one at that.

He asks me to tell him about the guys, his already subdued tone deflating further. I use Harding’s words to tell him about Dugan and Falsworth. Passed away young, I say. I tell him how Jim and I grabbed beers together whenever I was in the LA office. I tell him about the couple times I talked to Dernier on the phone, in my much improved French, how he fucked off to Provence and started painting wildly, I mean that literally, the shit is as wild as he was. He sent me the piece I have on the south wall, I can’t wait to show him, next to a comparatively tranquil Pollock. I tell him lastly about Gabe, the one I was closest to because he lived so close, our weekly dinners, our two-man book club. He was easy to be friends with. He never demanded for me to be the person he used to know. He got to know the new one, and he must have either liked it okay or thought I was just pitiful enough to keep around him until he died.

I navigate the entire narration with extreme caution, careful to avoid laying any touchpoint that Steve could use to begin assembling a firm timeline.

I’m not sure how much he’s even listening. He injects the odd vocalization from the back of his throat, but he stares out the window. Sometimes I catch him fixated on a car next to us, even some junk heap of a Hyundai before they got decent. I divert a little from the most direct route, banking that they will see us still heading in the right general direction and not order our tail to close in. I creep down Constitution, and it’s so late that there’s not even anybody crawling up my ass. I roll us past the Mall to give him a glimpse of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. He’s undoubtedly seen them before, but he still presses closer to the window as we pass by.

I don’t know what I expected this ride to be, but it wasn’t this. I’m relieved to reach the edge of my neighborhood. I have to hunt for a few blocks until I find a spot I can wedge the Explorer into. Steve seems impressed by how expertly I parallel park such a large vehicle, but it could be that he’s just impressed by the invention of the backup camera.

I reach into the back seat and drop one of my hoodies onto Steve’s lap. “Put this on.”

He does. I flip the hood over his head and we get out.

The streets are quiet, save for the odd burst of sound from drunk people getting pushed out of the bars at closing time. Steve isn’t great at keeping his head low, too busy taking in the architecture, the darkened storefronts of boutiques and restaurants and patisseries that I’ve already been planning to take him to as soon as Fury gives the green light.

“What neighborhood is this?”

“Logan Circle.”

“It’s nice.” He tips his chin toward a bar just up ahead. “What’s with the rainbows?”

“It means… gay. That it’s gay-friendly.”

His head tilts. I don’t think this is making it clearer. I grab a couple other words, ones that feel less pleasant as I push them out.

“Like queers. Fairies.”

I’m not sure what to make of the look Steve is giving me, mouth a little slack, the rest of his face deeply perplexed. “They just put it out there?”

“Yeah.” I want to tell him that it’s not a big deal, that nobody cares about that stuff anymore, not here, but I can’t get a read on him. I can’t tell whether this is good news to him or another slap in the face from a runaway world.

So I’m not particularly disappointed when Steve goes quiet and stays that way until we get to my building. I lead him to the top floor of a four-story walk-up. He casts looks down the hallway as I fiddle with my keys, hand shaking a little as I turn the locks. I get to work flipping on the lights, but there’s no footsteps trailing behind me. He’s still standing just inside the doorway.

“Jesus,” he says under his breath. And I think it’s the good kind of Jesus.

I lived in a lot of dumps in a lot of shitty neighborhoods for a long time. It’s what felt most like home. The shouting in the streets, the clomping of footsteps on hard wooden floors upstairs, the harsh street lights as they pierced through the blinds. It was the only way I could ever sleep back then, surrounded in noise and light. That much didn’t change, but I found my own ways to recreate it later. It took Tony visiting to rattle me out of it, the way he called it disgusting, his refusal to sit on any of my shitty second hand furniture, how his face looked like Sister Mary Idunno’s as she caught a whiff of O’fuckingsomething’s pants. It took him offering to get me a better place on his own dime, fully furnished with stuff that didn’t reek like someone’s dog.

It was never about the money, though. I have been extremely well compensated for years, Peggy made sure of that. My bank account was exploding with cash, and I had even more taped behind the fridge and under the dresser, hoarding it like an edgy doomsdayer. I didn’t let Tony buy me anything, but I did let him lead me around DC, where he aggressively batted around the real estate agent with terse, derisive remarks about almost every space they tried to sell me except this one and one other in Georgetown. He liked this one especially, the industrial feel of it, the open floor plan, the loft. I never imagined a living space that would also grant me a built in overwatch position. He gave me the number for his decorator but I never called her. I sat in an empty apartment for months, sleeping on the floor next to a strewn pile of home furnishing catalogues I’d marked up with a sharpie. And I started building my own home in earnest, piece by piece, choking down shame with every dollar spent on something nice. I was surprised by how easily it became a routine, once I got the hang of it, buying and replacing until it felt just right.

“You can come in. Close the door.”

Steve does get the door closed and locked but only takes a couple steps forward, his head craning to the high ceilings, eyes tracking along the walls of exposed brick, the stairs to the loft. “Wow.”

Holy cow, as Bucky Barnes apparently said.

I want to take him by the arm and yank him in, force him to feel at home, as if I could do so by just wanting it badly enough. Because I can feel him starting to slip away again, retreat back into himself, the distance in his eyes, the rigor mortis he’s stuck in.

Of course, this is all just more evidence of the displacement. Of me from him, him from me. I know this and I get it. But I also want, greedily, for Steve to appreciate what I’ve made for myself. I want him to be proud of me, him more than Tony, more than Peggy, more than Gabe. But I haven’t given him a way to truly understand any of this yet. He can’t appreciate the tail end of a journey he doesn’t even know I’ve taken.

I sigh and stride to the fridge. “You hungry?”

His response is swift and a little too eager. “Sure, I could eat.”

I grab two porterhouse steaks, the tupperware of fingerling potatoes I roasted this afternoon, and fire up two pans on my Viking range. As I work, Steve edges toward the island and slides carefully into one of the bar stools.

“Something to drink?” I ask.

“Just water, thanks.”

I float around the kitchen, filling up a glass from the dispenser in the fridge, setting it in front of him, firing up the microwave for the potatoes, seasoning the steaks with spices we would have had to be rich to afford. I thought earlier that I might playfully narrate the wonders of modern appliances as I used them, but I find myself falling quiet, resigning myself to the painful awkwardness. When I peek over my shoulder, I find that he’s not even watching me at all. He’s staring into the blue pearl granite countertop sprawled out before him, his mouth flat.

What did the old me do at times like these? Did I let him sit? Did I crack a joke? Did I ask him what was wrong? I desperately want to be familiar to him right now. I don’t know. I don’t know how to be right.

“I saw Peggy last week,” I say.

His head lifts. “How is she?”

“Pretty good. She lives in England. I never thought she’d retire, let alone go back there. But it felt right, I guess.”

“Does she know?”

“No. I need to tell her before she sees it on the news.”

Fury cleared me to call her tomorrow, a courtesy backed by a career’s worth of her discretion. I’m not even going to plan for a way to break it to her; some things are best just stated plainly. At least it’s something good. She might cry, and I think I’m ready for that.

“Are you close?” Steve asks.

I flip over both steaks with a pair of tongs. I love the raw, searing sound of it, the smell that wafts up from the done side.

“We talk every week or two,” I tell him.

“Good.” He repeats the word and gets that smile again, the one he wore when Harding told him about the cherry blossoms.

Relief drops like a stone through me. It’s the first smile from him that I’ve seen since HQ, and I hold it tight as I finish dinner, the silence between us finally feeling substantive.

There’s something familiar and deeply satisfying about sliding a huge plate of home-cooked food in front of Steve. Maybe I used to do it before, but I don’t remember cooking much. The steak is so big that there’s barely enough room for the potatoes, so I pile what I can’t fit on top.

Our eyes meet. It feels like they haven’t met all night, always touching and going, drifting and averting.

“Thank you.”

Steve’s hand twitches on the countertop, and he’s smiling again, regarding me, his face cast in handsome light and shadow from the pendant fixtures hanging over our heads.

“Of course,” I say.

There’s more companionable quiet as we dig into our meals. I delight in the small sounds Steve makes as he chews his steak, the little guttural _mmm_ s that come from him. He notices the voracity with which I attack my food, just like he does. It’s a habit more than a reflection of my true hunger now, the compulsion to stuff, to preserve, just in case.

“So, you got the serum,” he says.

“ _A_ serum,” I clarify. “Before you found me.”

A groove forms between Steve’s brows. I wonder if he’s remembering the same thing I am, however it must have looked to him, discovering me there, dirty and babbling, haunted, with some essential piece hollowed out of me, hosed down some drain in the floor or carved out of me with agonizing light.

“I didn’t know Schmidt made more,” Steve says slowly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Why didn’t I tell him? Why didn’t I tell him what? How do you explain what you don’t understand, what you don’t want to understand, what was made to happen to you, a wafting float of trash you want to sweep into a dark corner of yourself and never look at again?

“I didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.” I stab a potato with my fork, and the metal clinks hard onto the porcelain of my dinner plate.

Steve shoves a cut of steak into his mouth and chews it vigorously. “Is that why you look so young?”

It might feel like a liberation, letting everything slip out now, dumping the sum of my history onto his lap while he scarfs down hunks of meat. I could drop the whole game now, quit this tiring dance, leave him to wade and flail around in it while I hit the streets or just go back to work. Crash on my cot. Slip into the 9:00 mission controller’s meeting and bitch once again about the over-utilization of AFSATCOM’s relays or the decision to contract out our asset tracking system, even to Stark Industries.

But me Version 6.3 doesn’t have that kind of fortitude. He’ll run until he’s smashed against a wall and try to run still, until his body collapses under him.

“I suppose,” I say. “You’ll probably get another hundred years out of that mug of yours.”

I wonder if he even knows the trouble that face is about to get him into. I can’t even imagine what the paparazzi will do with him, the entire Greatest Generation pressed into a single Adonic mould. And I’ll be last week’s meatloaf. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s the best thing now.

Steve looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “You’re really big.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

I now know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of conversations like these, as so many of those around me have been over the years. It roughly goes: basic point A, more abstract point B, glaringly obvious observation C, then start again. It’s the course of the brain as it attempts to make logical sense out of sheer fucking madness. But I don’t find that I need to mine patience for him now. I’m happy for anything he says, anything that’s not cold silence, even if they are words that tip over something in me. Words I can’t return with sincerity.

Steve finishes his last couple bites and pushes away his empty plate with a murmur of appreciation. I don’t miss the glance he sneaks at my plate. It wouldn’t be unlike us, I don’t think, giving bits away, taking bits sometimes. Steve’s offers of his meager field rations were especially generous and genuine and rarely accepted. We all knew how much he needed just to keep his blood pumping. We all knew his hunger was depthless.

I ease my plate toward him. “Want it?”

“You don’t mind?”

“I ate earlier. Have at it.”

He pulls my plate to himself and digs into it like it’s the first food he’s had in a day. He uses my knife and fork. It makes me feel good, this one small thing.

I give Steve a small tour after, not that there’s much touring to do. It’s all in plain sight. I should just let him wander the space on his own, at his own pace, like he did with his new room at HQ, but I want to show him my flowers and my books and my art and my bathroom. I show him how to work the shower, a decadently modern walk-in with dark stone walls and a rain shower head. He shakes his head weakly, so overwhelmed by it all, that I doubt he takes in a single instruction.

He asks me to leave him alone in the bathroom and so I do, bringing his bag for him in case he needs it. He stays in there for a long time, and I distract myself by making up the sleeper-sofa for him. I temper the force of my fist as I cram three different kinds of pillows into their cases. I throw them hard on the mattress, slam them down two-handed, pleased by the smack they make when they land.

The pipes suddenly groan as the shower starts. I never heard a toilet flush or anything. Not anything at all. Maybe he was poking around, opening the cabinets and drawers quietly, mapping the new terrain, finding the towels I forgot to show him, reading the labels of hair products and skin products and enormous prescription bottles with improbable directions: take eight pills for pain every two to four hours; take six pills one hour before sleep, repeat after four hours if needed; take five pills as needed for anxiety. Or maybe he was doing what I did for so long, bracing himself over the sink, staring into the person reflected to him, wondering how he could be that but also be this.

I fluff and arrange the pillows nicely, like they do in hotels. I smooth both hands over the comforter and step back to appraise its appeal. I want Steve to be able to fold himself into it, pull the comforter tight over his shoulder, the way he used to bury himself. This bed might be big enough for him to feel small in.

I’m at the sink, tending to the pile of dishes, when I hear the crack of the bathroom door opening. Steve walks out wearing a SHIELD-issue PT uniform, shorts that look almost obscenely small on his large form, a t-shirt that any agent would be yelled at for not tucking in, possibly by me.

“Do you want something else to sleep in?”

He shakes his head. “This is fine.”

Yeah. I would say it is.

“If you want, you can take a look in my closet, see if there’s anything you like for tomorrow.” I jerk my head toward the loft. “Help yourself.”

I turn back to the dishes, but I don’t lose sight of him out of the corner of my eye. His interest pulls him to the stairs, and his fingers slide up the rail as he ascends to my bedroom. He looks down at the lay of things from up there, hips pushed up to the rail framing the loft, big hands curled around the bar.

“Jesus, Bucky, this _place_.” Steve says it like he’s just scaled Everest, a little breathless, a little giddy.

And I’m smiling. I’m scrubbing the meat gunk off of a pan, grinning like an idiot.

After his survey, there's a gentle grinding sound as my closet slides open. I count the seconds loosely before I get a reaction.

“My God...”

“Anything’s yours, if you can fit in it,” I call over my shoulder.

But I’m not sure that he can fit, to be honest. He’s got nearly two inches and at least 20 pounds on me. And I am almost positive that he will not appreciate my style, much of it as fashion-forward as the haircut he despises.

He’s disappeared from my line of sight, but I imagine him strolling through the racks, running his fingers over my cashmere sweaters, marveling over the denim of my $150 skinny jeans, touching the sleeves of my coats, pressing his foot to the bottom of my very many pairs of shoes to see if they might fit. I imagine him going deeper, to the place where a couple of bespoke suits hang in bags and—

And terror flushes through me, suddenly, violently. I slap the handle of the sink and don’t dry my hands, rushing to the stairs and vaulting up them two at a time. I bank a sharp turn toward the closet.

He’s massaging the hem of the right sleeve between two fingers, drawing it into his line of sight. His head cocks, and he grabs the hangar by the neck and pulls the whole thing out.

I never knew what to do with it. I had it, I took it off after I got to Peggy and Howard, after they gave me real clothes that didn’t quite fit, but what do you do with something like that? Do you throw it away? Do you give it to a museum? What kind of fucked up museum would want it? I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything with it.

Steve holds it out at arm’s length. “What’s this?”

I don’t have an answer. I watch him brush his hand over the strips of black leather, the horizontal bands stacked from collarbone to belt . He looks surprised by the feel of it, buttery and worn, pliable and absolutely silent. Nobody would ever guess how soft it is.

He takes a couple steps toward me and presses it to my torso, like he’s testing to see if it would fit me. I am not breathing anymore. But it’s worse when he pulls it back, turns it around, and presses it to his own chest. He’s not the least bit grave about it; it’s the curiosity of someone considering a Halloween costume for themselves.

“Stop.”

I yank it out of his hand and push past him to wedge it back where it came from. I shove my other clothes against it, hiding it, burying it, pinning it against the wall.

Steve’s brows have narrowed. He’s so close to me that I can smell my soap on him. He probably dumped a pile of it in his hands and didn’t even use the shower puff I got him.

“It’s just something I used to wear. A long time ago.”

The explanation is weak, but at least it’s true. It could be enough to push this down the road, just a little bit longer.

His face searches mine. “Okay.”

It feels too easy to get let off the hook, but it makes more sense when he tries to stifle a yawn into the back of his hand.

“Tired?”

“Completely.

“Go to bed whenever you want.” It comes out more curtly than I intend, wrung through the tightness in my throat. I glance to the clock on the wall. It’ll be morning soon.

“Do you have to work tomorrow?” Steve asks as I trail him down the stairs.

“No, I can take the day off.”

“Good.” His feet land on the hardwood floor, steps surprisingly light, surprisingly graceful, as he makes his way to his bed. “I’ll wait til you’re ready.”

I almost wish he wouldn’t. I can’t shake off a desperate need to be alone, to have him drift off into unconsciousness so I don’t have to think about what he’s about to say or do next. I finish cleaning up the kitchen, grab a change of clothes, and head for a quick shower to wash off the sweat that’s still clinging to my armpits and between my shoulder blades. Steve still hasn’t settled yet. He’s perusing my books, hands on his hips and dipping at the waist to read their spines. One entire wall is covered in shelves of them, six layers high, fiction and nonfiction, textbooks and pulp paperbacks.

After Hydra, I set to make myself a man who knew things, whatever things he chose to know. His memory might have been a moth-eaten sieve, but his mind was built for high-yield absorption. It dawned on me one day, wandering the immense stacks of the New York Public Library, that I could use this weapon against them, to know the world they kept from me. I would learn about art, politics, geology, history, literature, biology, film, no topic was too frivolous, no word too obscure for me to try to slot into my vocabulary. I was fanatical about it for years until it tapered off into a low but undying thrum. It is the greatest desire I have ever allowed myself to fulfill.

After my shower, Steve is under the covers, the blankets pulled up over himself. He tracks me as I approach, gaze flicking up and down my body, like he’s still trying to consolidate this me in his existing memories. Apparently he likes the firm pillow best. He’s got one of my books open and lying flat on his chest.

_A Clockwork Orange._ I nearly choke on my own saliva.

“Do you know what that book’s about?” It’s probably the dumbest question I’ve asked in a year.

“Nah.” He picks it up and regards the front of it. “I just like the cover. Is it good?”

I can see why he would pick it, based on appearance alone. It’s the original cover, colorful, a face with one cog-eye. Very ‘60s, as far as I understand the decade. But I don’t think dystopian dark satire is the best entree into the fiction he missed.

“It’s… interesting. I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

An eyebrow rises. “Any other recommendations?”

I meander to the shelves, and I think of the ones I originally recommended. He’d like them, no doubt, and surely I’ll foist them on him later. But a different book catches my eye now, and I brush my finger over the title. _Where The Red Fern Grows_ may be childish and a little on the nose, given where my life is quickly heading. But I think he might like it.

I pull it from the shelf and hand it to him, holding out my other hand to accept the Burgess.

He lets out an exaggerated sigh of relief as we trade. “Good. I could barely understand any of that stuff, anyway.”

I smirk and re-shelve it next to all the other dystopian works the agents joked about earlier. I have them all and enjoy them all. It makes my own life feel a little less outlandish.

“Okay, well, there’s the lamp.” I point stupidly to it, as if it’s not within his arm’s reach. “You can turn it out whenever. Or leave it on, I really don’t care. And help yourself to anything. I mean it.”

“Thanks.”

I hold onto a scrap of hope he’ll take me up on leaving the light on, or at least fall asleep while reading to let it happen on its own. If he even is reading. I don’t know how he could. But he’s so hungry for the world, and that hunger might be stronger than the one for sleep. He never needed much of that, anyway. If it were just me, when it always is, I leave the light above the stove on all night, not bright enough to keep me up but enough to make a small pocket of comfort in the abysmal pitch of dark. I’ve been possibly dreading this most of all, more than my past leaking out from me. I’m worried that this will force it out, against my will. I don’t want him to know yet just how fucked up I am.

“Bucky?” he says as I’m ascending the stairs.

“Hm?”

“I’m glad.” He cranes his head around to look at me, and his lips are curled into a soft smile. “I’m really glad.”

I think my own smile is a little shaky, but I manage to hold it. “Good.”

I’m in bed, staring at the ceiling, when the light clicks out about an hour later. My breath stills in my chest as the apartment falls into total darkness. I picked this place for a reason, one on a little side street, away from any main drags, mostly to keep assholes from snapping pictures at my windows. But, God, I’d give anything now to be in my first place in Brooklyn, when I still tried to call it home, the way the yellow city light filtered through with an almost sentient aggression.

My eyes dart around in the dark, but even with the blinds open, what filters through is so dim that it might as well not even be there. I tell myself fervently that my eyes will adjust, that it’ll look brighter soon, but my chest is getting tighter already, I can’t hear Steve breathing, I can’t hear the drunks, I can’t hear anything except my own heart thrumming in my ears, the worst sound, one of the only sounds I heard for nearly a year, I had to look at the files to find out how long they kept me like that, it felt like a lifetime, I’d scream just to hear something echoing in my head, until I forgot why I was screaming at all, until it didn’t even sound like my own voice, just a mirage of a creature that became an enemy as I lost my mind, until I didn’t make any sound at all just to keep it away, and something coils in me now, something festering with energy, it could be a scream, I might start screaming now, and Steve would come running up and he’d see the truth, he’d hear the truth, and I can’t, _I can’t_ , I touch my arm, I touch my heaving chest, I touch my face and my hair to prove that I’m here, that I’m not that creature, as I tilt into full panic.

“Are you okay up there?”

Steve. Oh God, no. No.

“Fine.”

I clamp my hand over my mouth but my breath still comes, huffing and hot against my fingers. Steve doesn’t say anything more. I don’t know if he falls asleep. I don’t know if I’m letting him.

I keep corpse-still, eyes wide, gagging, teeth clenched together, until the sun comes up.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

I drag myself upright at around eight and sit on the edge of the mattress, head in my hands, feeling like I was just scraped off the bottom of a boot. It takes me at least ten minutes to push myself up, throw on some sweats, and murmur that I’m gonna go out and grab coffee. I don’t really need to be so quiet about it, because Steve is wide awake, stretching where he lies, joints popping and crackling. As I collect my wallet and my smokes, he tries to ask me again about last night, or this morning, whatever fucking time, but I blow him off with a couple halfhearted dismissals and slip out the door.

I see my neighbor on the stairs, walking up as I clomp down. He’s got his own coffee in hand and a leather bag slung over his shoulder.

“Updesh,” I grumble as I pass, his name uttered with a heaping of sarcasm.

“Hey, good morning!”

Apparently he wasn’t expecting me to run out so soon, so he’s probably more irritated than he looks. He could have passed earlier for just a coincidence, but now he’ll have to work extra hard to not look like he’s doing exactly what he does: following my ass around town and making sure I don’t get hauled off by goons, as if he could do anything to stop them. He’s just a kid, probably Steve’s age, bright-eyed and hopeful, unexposed to evil, thoroughly unqualified to be my personal protection. He will soon be the seventh Special Services officer I’ve chewed through in two years.

I smoke a couple of badly needed cigarettes on the walk to the coffee shop, sucking them down voraciously, and I start to calm a little. It’s possible that what I really needed was the fresh air and the sun hitting my face. Up ahead, a woman is stopped with a girl who can’t be older than twelve, and they’re looking at me. The girl’s lips are moving fast, _will you ask him, please, please, Mom please_. The girl’s hand goes tight on her mother’s sleeve as she asks me for an autograph, very polite, and I feel a strong impulse to drive on, to say ‘sorry, in a hurry, not today, actively trying not to lose my fucking mind, maybe next time.’ But I look at this girl’s face, half-hidden behind her mother, her bottom lip pulled into her mouth, anxious and hopeful, and I don’t think I want to add _crushed little girl’s dreams_ to my list of routine offenses. So I stop and I hold my cigarette between my lips as I scrawl my name messily on the side of the girl’s paper Starbucks bag with a pen her mom dug out of the bottom of her purse. The girl is thrilled, Mom decidedly less so. And, sure, I get it. I caught enough of my reflections on the walk to know that I’m doing a pretty good impersonation of a strung-out hobo, my hair a mess, my sunglasses incapable of masking my exhaustion, smoking with the desperation of a man who just narrowly escaped death. I need to think back on moments like these if I ever start to wonder why I’m publicly called a disgrace and a fraud.

I do ask if they’re visiting or if they live here (visiting, from Oregon, heading to the Vietnam Memorial after this). The girl looks up at me and rambles — _I’m sorry I’m just— I’m like such a fan and I knew you lived around here and I like— Oh my God I can’t— thank you my friend’s dad was in Seattle you like saved his life Oh my God she’s gonna be megajealous I’m sorry I’m sorry Oh my God_ — Her cheeks are flushing, her smile bashful, her teeth just a little too big for her face and secured by braces with little pink and purple rubber bands on them.

“You want a picture or something?” I ask.

“Oh my God, really?” The girl bounces on the toes of her— Jesus Christ, they’re the limited edition Captain America Converse All Stars that they tried to get me to shill back in February. Look out, folks, Miss Ohmygod is a certified superfan.

I nod and take a final drag off my cigarette, but it catches hard in my throat, sending me into a shockingly rough fit of coughing, bent at the waist, hacking, my chest clenching, the butt of my smoke dropping and rolling off somewhere.

“Oh my God, are you okay?” The girl puts her hand on my shoulder, very lightly, just for a second, before drawing it away and clenching it into a small fist at her side. “Sorry,” she says under her breath.

I shake my head and wave off her apology with an unsteady hand, still coughing.

“Honey, maybe we should get going,” Mom says, quietly.

I brace my hands on my knees and push myself upright, clearing my throat. Everything tilts a little, but I gesture to her shoes. “Want me to get those, too?”

There’s another fit of ecstatic Oh my Godding, and Mother really must love this kid, because she doesn’t object when I stoop down and sign them both across the side.

“Anything else?” I say. “You want that picture?”

She nods vigorously and stands by my side while Mom fiddles with the camera. I ask her what she wants me to do, quietly, just to her, and she goes an even deeper shade of crimson and shyly wonders if I could put my arm around her. I guide her by the shoulders over to the left side of me and drape my metal arm over her. It’s what they all want, to say they’ve touched it, that it’s touched them, and I throw up a peace sign and force a corner of my mouth to turn up. Miss Ohmygod gives me a flinching wave as we part ways, beaming, and I try to focus on that and not on the disappointment in Mom’s face.

The guy at the coffee shop already has my drink for me when I reach the counter, and he gives a surprised little “oh!” when I tell him I need another, then completely blank out on what Steve drinks. The guy says it’s hard to go wrong with a mocha, unless someone just doesn’t like chocolate; I know Steve does, so I order that and a few croissants. They fit my drinks into a carrier at the other end of the espresso bar, and I pull up the hood of the sweatshirt Steve wore last night and pray that nobody else is feeling intrepid enough to stop me. I wonder how far back _Updesh_ is, what he did when I stopped for my little photo op. You can only stoop to tie your shoes for so long.

When I crack open my apartment door, Steve is sitting on the couch in one of my t-shirts and a pair of sweatpants that are just a little too short for him, reading. The bed is put away, the bedding folded in a neat pile on the side of it and stacked with the pillows.

“Hey!” he greets.

“Hey.”

I walk to where he’s seated and edge the carrier toward him. “The whipped cream is probably melted, but it’s a mocha. I forgot to ask what you wanted.”

Steve pries the lid off the cup and smells it. He gives a broad smile, and it hits me then that not only has he never had one of these, he probably hasn’t had chocolate in months. Maybe longer. I should have gotten the chocolate croissants. A brownie. I should have filled the bag with chocolate, it’s just all sitting there like it was never a luxury.

He takes the first sip of his mocha and his eyes slip closed. “Oh my God, this is so good.”

“Good.”

I serve him two croissants on a plate and perch on one of the stools at the island, facing him. “How do you like the book?”

“Is it a kid’s book? Is that where you think I am?” He says it playfully, only dubiously offended, if at all.

“Yeah. But it’s still good.”

“I like it, but I feel like something bad’s gonna happen.”

I don’t offer him any hints, unless my silence counts for one. I take a deep swig of my creamy espresso shots and bite the end off my croissant.

He doesn’t ask me again about last night, thank Christ. He asks me more about work, what my day looks like, and he seems surprised by the sheer amount of admin work I do.

“I could never do that. Sounds too boring.”

“Yeah, I don’t think you could. It’s not bad. I’m on a lot of projects, so I stay busy.”

“Wow. You really done good, huh?”

That, I’m never sure of. I shrug. “Pays the bills.”

Steve tears a chunk of croissant off, the crisp bits of it falling onto his plate. He doesn’t eat it like I do, sinking my teeth into it and ripping into it. He pulls it apart and feeds himself strips of it, licking the butter off his fingers after. It’s indulgent. Appreciative. I don’t think I ever ate food like that after I came back. I shoveled it down as fast as I could, until I was sick from it, like a starving dog that doesn’t know anything but its own gnawing emptiness.

“So… I wanted to ask you something.”

The question stills my chewing, just for a second. “Okay.”

He picks up a fallen flake of croissant off his plate and pushes it into his mouth. “You said that SHIELD found you. Did you mean the SSR?”

Shit. He really was listening. _Shit_. I should have said that instead. It’s a dangling thread, the mother thread that winds through the whole story. My whole story. One little tug and the whole thing will unravel. So I face a choice — patently lie to cover my tracks, or blow everything open now. And I’m way too tired, way too frayed, for the latter. Maybe I’ll tell him tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. I need to find the words. I need to find words that are strong enough to hold him up on them. I’m so worried what will happen if they don’t.

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s what I meant.”

Steve frowns, deeply. “Why didn’t they tell me? It was weeks.” There’s an edge to his voice and places where it’s going thin. “Why wouldn’t they tell me they found you?”

“It took a while. You were already gone.”

Harding would give me an approving nod for that particular euphemism.

“Where were you? You must’ve—”

“I was hurt. Other people found me. Patched me up.” I feel a grimace try to fight its way onto my face. “I didn’t get back to them for a while. And you were gone.”

“God.” He sets his plate on the cushion beside him. He touches his lower lip, pinches it a little between his thumb and forefinger.

No. There was no God in those mountains that day. No God in that country. No God in that entire war. No God after that. Not for me, anyway.

“I didn’t even think to check. I was so— I assumed and I was just—” He falters for a few moments, eyebrows gathering, jaw clenching. “I just wanted to kill him. It’s all I wanted. It’s all I could think about.”

Good. I’m glad he didn’t mourn for me. I’m glad he didn’t waste his time. I’m glad he went after that piece of shit and put the world out of his misery.

“What happened to him?” I ask. “Really.”

Steve’s head jerks up from where it had drooped. “They didn’t tell you what I said?”

“Well, yeah, but they said he vanished or something.”

“He did. Well, not vanished, not really. There was this light from the cube, he was holding it in his hands and the light shot up, and he disappeared. I don’t know if he disappeared or he disintegrated or what, but he was gone. And the cube burned a hole through the floor and fell.”

“Huh.” I try to imagine what that would look like, that horrifying face, torn part by a shock of blue light and then— gone.

“Did they ever find it?”

“Yeah. Howard and his team found it like a year later. He was looking for you, but he found that instead.”

His fingers curl. “What’d they do with it?”

“Buried it. Not quite literally, but they threw it in one of our deep storage facilities. Only a couple people know exactly where.”

And there is more to the story, so much more, something I’ve never told anyone, not ever. I act like I don’t care about my career sometimes, but I do. And I care even more about not being thrown in prison.

Steve is reading whatever look I have on my face, eyes sharp like a falcon’s, translating me in a way that nobody alive can. It’s the intuitive intelligence that I fear, why I have to expend so much energy to deceive him, because some things about me he just knows, like how an archeologist can comb through layers of aged earth and brush off a shard of clay and know, quickly and assuredly, that it used to be a Beaker urn.

I feel urgently, feverishly, compelled to tell him. To let him know that he’s right, that what he’s seeing in me is real, that I’m ancient pottery in his knowing hands right now. I forgot the exhilaration of being discovered this way, by anyone.

I set down my coffee and plate on the countertop and stand. I jerk my head toward the bathroom and, after a confused frown, he follows. I lead us to the bathroom, close the door, and turn on all the water I can. I cast a glance to the mirror and then to the outer wall of the shower, and yeah, I think the angle works. Then I unzip my hoodie and pull off my shirt, and I flick my hand in an upward gesture to urge Steve to do the same. He stares at me for a moment, his eyes saucer-wide, before he mirrors me, slower, his earlier grace stuttering. I strip down to my underwear and think to go further, why take off anything if I’m not gonna take off those too, but my brain’s not coordinating this response very well and sends me into the shower like that, waving Steve in behind me. I wedge into the far corner, back to the solid wall blocking the view from the outside. I’m pretty sure they would give me at least this privacy, I’m banking on it hard right now, but with only half a mind.

Steve walks through the entrance, there’s no door to open, just a man-sized gap far enough away from the shower head to prevent any water from rolling out onto the heated floor. He takes a few steps in, gingerly, sliding against the opposite wall to avoid as much of the water as possible. He moves into his own corner, still looking spooked but gathering some situational awareness around him, eyes darting around the space, slow comprehension settling.

And I’m about to open my mouth, I do, but I’m halted by what I see when my gaze flickers down Steve’s body, to the front of his water-speckled gray briefs. He’s… I think he’s a little hard.

He cups his hands over himself, going red like the tourist girl, a flush creeping down his fair skin, almost to his chest. He looks to the floor and I snap out of it, attention shifting to the slate walls, thin slices of it that look hand-stacked, a bit haphazardly. Another track starts carving through my thoughts, fractions of questions, nothing that assembles into anything rational or even solidly graspable.

I don’t know how long to wait for something like this to pass, so I take my cue from Steve, looking back to him only when his head rises again, when I feel his gaze tentatively hunting me, pausing at the angry redness where the seam of my skin meets my left arm. I take a deep breath and our eyes meet.

“So…”

I mouth it almost silently, the level just below a whisper, the way we could talk to each other in a forest or an abandoned village that was too quiet for comfort. He gives a little nod, cheeks still red but clearer now, focused.

“Last year, I get this email. I don’t recognize the account.” God, does he even know what an email is? “It’s a message telling me to check one of my drawers, the one I always keep locked, the one only I can open. At least I thought. And I look in there, and there’s a file that I didn’t put there, plans, weapons, and I realize pretty quick that I _know_ these weapons, I’ve seen them, we saw them, the shit that sprays you into blue atoms.

“Except they’re not quite the same. They’re our plans. SHIELD plans. And I realize, holy fuck, they’re trying to make this shit. _We’re_ trying to make this shit now. And I’m freaking out, because I know what they do—”

Steve’s face changes then, grim now. He gives me another nod.

“But I don’t know who to tell, because I know this has Fury’s name on it, probably Hill’s. Who the fuck else do I tell? And I just— I can’t let it go. They have no fucking idea what this is. They don’t know… And so I…” I hesitate. “I leak them to the Times. Like deep fucking stealth leak, meet this woman, pass the plans over. A copy, anyway, just in case they shit-can it.”

It was one of the most ridiculously cinematic things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a lot of cinematic and ridiculous things. It involved taking four cabs to a strip mall on Long Island and crawling into her car in the parking lot, head jerking over my shoulder, so nervous I could barely speak.

“So, they run the story. SHIELD goes fucking bananas. There’s a huge congressional inquiry. They reveal that they’ve got all these plans for the Tesseract, weapons, space travel, all this crazy shit. There’s a huge internal investigation, trying to figure out who squealed. Thank God I can beat a polygraph, or I’d be fucked.”

And now Steve looks… furious, his jaw tight enough to crush glass. “And you expect me to trust these people? Look what we’re doing.” His eyes narrow. “They bug your _apartment_?”

I shrug. I used to find bugs at least three times a year, until I pitched an ungodly fit and threatened to quit. They had to call security on that one. And I can’t tell if they stopped or if they just got better at bugging.

“Jesus Christ.”

“But it’s buried. I mean that. Nobody’s touching it anymore. I have trusted sources who confirmed.”

Coulson hasn’t lied to me yet. I don’t know if he can. I signed his fucking trading card, so I figure he owes me at least through the end of eternity.

“Who leaked it to you?”

I shrug again. I still don’t know that part. Sometimes I wonder if it was Romanoff. Maybe even Coulson. But that’s not exactly Coulson’s style. It _is_ Romanoff’s.

Steve shakes his head with a snort of disgust. He’s definitely not hard anymore.

So I let myself look at him again, in the distant, thoughtful way one admires a piece of fine art, where you can’t tell if you actually really like what you see or if you’re just impressed with the technique used to create it. I forgot what he looked like, really looked like, now. In my memories, in my dreams, he’s almost always small. But I do remember the first time I touched him when he was like this, when I took his immense shoulder in my weak grip as he hoisted me off of the table. I dangled off of him, he was so big. I remember the feel of his huge palm against my neck, just for a second. I remember him later, when we got back to base, when he stripped out of his leather jacket and brown pants and boots, then peeled out of the ridiculous Captain America choir girl getup below it. And he did have to peel that part off, it was so tight on him. I watched him from the floor, arms curled around my bent knees, sick and empty, and he sat down beside me in just his underclothes, nudging that shoulder into mine, not saying anything because he just knew not to. He felt alien to me then, all the molecules of him completely rearranged. And I felt the gulf stretching between us then, like it’s been stretching between us now since that first day in the basement at SHIELD. Only now do I begin to feel something like a rebound, something that could have just as easily snapped but couldn’t. And he must have felt that distance too, back then, but he didn’t try to run away from it or lie his way out of it. He slept on the floor with me, even though the bed was right there. He kept his distance like I asked him to, but he was also there. He was always there. Until he wasn’t. I don’t know if I ever missed anything as hard as his simple presence.

A great heave of air pushes out of him, and he sags a little against the wall. I let myself do the same, feeling like a spent balloon.

“Well,” he says, not whispering anymore, “thanks for telling me.”

“I just had to.”

There’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth, a tiny uptick that surfaces from his obvious displeasure with the shenanigans of SHIELD. “This is a really nice shower.”

“Yeah, sorry.” I look down to my own body, the droplets of water clinging to my skin, the water I can feel but not see, soaked into the black fabric of my own underwear. “I couldn’t think of anything else.”

He’s the one who shrugs this time. “You’ve had worse ideas.”

I’m sure I have. Most of my ideas seem bad these days. Unpopular, if still respected. If still effective. But it’s the first time in days I haven’t felt like I’m riding the thin edge of my worst idea yet, the one I’m pretty sure is about to backfire hard in my face.

But that won’t stop me from stealing every moment like this, just like this, until it does.

—

It’s my fourth day back at the office, after my single day spent with Steve. I’ve been crawling out of my skin at home, it’s the first time I've regretted the open floor plan, the way that I can never escape the man now living with me. I can’t escape the questions he asks and all of the ones he doesn’t. I thought I was pretty good at lying — lying about being in pain, lying about being functional, lying about being a cored-out hull of a human. I suppose with time, when I didn’t have to lie quite as much about those things, maybe I just got bad at it.

I finish banging out an email to Hill about the recruit selection committee, a project made monstrous by my rigid skepticism and demands for greater vetting, and scan over it once for correctness. Then I turn over my phone, my personal phone, and check for any messages I might have missed. I keep checking and double-checking, sure that I’ve left the ringer off, but it seems that Steve hasn’t yet tried to tackle this particular advancement. Or maybe he just knows to leave me alone.

It didn’t take as long as I suspected to teach him how to use the burner flip phone I bought for him retail. SHIELD gave me something different for him, far more capable, far more liable to get him into trouble. I left him with Peggy’s number, she was incredulous and overjoyed when I told her, she did cry a little, but I don’t think she was trying not to. She knows she doesn’t have to hide from me. What could we possibly hide now?

The first day back at work, I came home to him on the couch, red-eyed, voice still a little rough, book closed and lying on the coffee table. I wondered how long he had been crying, I wondered how he cries when nobody’s looking. Does he do what I do, choke it down, pretend it’s not happening, that it can’t happen, his body poised for a jolt of reproach or worse? Or does he let himself weep?

I sigh and sink into my chair, swiveling it around to face the windows. It’s been dark for a few hours now, the light slipping away so subtly that I barely noticed it was night until I lifted my head and suddenly saw the city lights. Steve is probably heating up the dinner I made for him before I left for work, on the flip side of this darkness. I’ve been hoping a few things for him — that he’s enjoying the assignments I’ve been giving him the past few days, that he’s not getting too restless, that he’s not digging around in the back of my closet again. I hope he’s not spending his days brooding about SHIELD and the Tesseract, like I’ve caught him doing when he didn’t know he was being watched. I made a serious case for him not taking any unplanned walks, ostensibly because he could get nabbed or swarmed by paps, I’m not sure which one is worse. Really, I just want to keep this delicate peace, this tender balance between us, where the lies haven’t yet reached critical mass and the truth is still weaker than my desire for equilibrium.

But it’s hard to stay rooted when living with someone like Steve. I don’t remember him being this surprising before, always tethered to the same patterns and qualities whether he was small or big. Now, I find myself thrown by little things he does that I can’t find a template for in my mind, no point of reference. I suppose it’s not at all unexpected; my memories are about as reliable as a bodega umbrella. But I never expected him to feel so exotic while still so familiar, like a bite of a kiwiberry: the thing you know, but not in quite this way. Like the way he eats his pastries. The way he’s made himself at home enough to do pull ups off the edge of my loft and declined pushups on my stairs. The way he cups his hand over his stomach or chest when I catch him sleeping. The way he watches me. The way I feel when being watched. The way I watch him, now. It’s a map of Pangea, familiar pieces rearranged in a foreign configuration.

I close my laptop and raise my arms overhead to stretch, hissing from the new shock of pain on my left side. I don’t know why this too is so hard for me to remember, that I’m breaking down as my body consumes itself in a catastrophic metabolic upheaval.

In the bathroom, I change into street clothes and wrestle with whether I should try to salvage what’s here or take a shower and start again. I’ve decided to lay off the smokes for a while, so I don’t smell off-putting. I’m a couple of sprays of cologne from maybe even smelling exceptionally good, just the right amount of sweat, the kind that people bury their faces into like fucking animals. It’s all we are, anyway. It feels so ridiculous to pretend sometimes.

I spritz myself with Polo and check my face from all sides. I watch my muscles flex beneath my t-shirt. When I turn around, my ass indeed does look as good in these jeans as I remember it. And I look fine. I don’t look like a sick man yet. Or a dead one.

And so I call Steve to tell him I have to stay late. And I make a stop in Georgetown.

—

The guy sneaks looks at me for the better part of an hour. He’s on a stool a few down from mine, drinking alone and watching the closed captioned coverage of the nightly news. I like this bar for its eclectic collection of patrons — students, yes, but also middle aged folks and young moms having a girls night with their friends who don’t have kids yet. I’ve picked up a lot of people here, a baited lure that rarely gets reeled in empty. I’m not particular. I’ll fuck anyone I find interesting. One of my best nights was spent with a woman probably old enough for grandchildren, charming and beautiful and masterful. It was a relief not to be the expert that night, to be with someone who didn’t suck cock like it was a porn audition, who knew how and when to touch me, not because she knew me but because she cared enough to really try to see me. Most people I meet are so intoxicated by the thrill of what they think I am that they don’t pause to consider that I might not be that at all.

I make eye contact with the guy. It’s hard to tell from the smile I receive what he wants me for. He might want to thank me for my service, God, I hope not. He might want to talk or, more likely, ask scores of tiring questions about my work, my past, my body. But when he snaps up the stool next to mine the second it’s vacated, his elbow brushes mine, and I think he might be interested in something entirely different.

We go through the motions of confirming that, yes, it really is me. His name is Caleb, and he’s got the air of a varsity athlete, maybe an endurance sport or lacrosse. He’s wiry as a whippet, his bare arms finely muscled, movements graceful. He’s made himself up to be some kind of bro, the basic starter set of a slightly ill-fitting t-shirt and jeans and gray baseball cap with a navy blue G on it. A strong, masculine cologne wafts off of him, but it’s not an unpleasant smell. He steers the conversation in predictable and excruciating directions — sports, movies, hot actresses. But he’s just a little too complimentary of women, crass but hollow as he tries to get me to dish on who I think has better tits: Selma Hayek or Penelope Cruz, and I get the sense that he’s just picking actresses he routinely confuses for each other.

I don’t bite on that, but I do brush my knee against his, slowly, deliberately. That shuts him up for a few seconds as he takes a long, unsteady pull off his drink. He’s definitely cute, fair-haired and covertly wholesome in a Wonder Bread, heartland kind of way. The manhood on his face has probably only recently chiseled through the thin layer of baby fat his mother gave him with her cooking.

He must know I’m fair game. My sexuality has been enthusiastically claimed in magazines and blogs and comment sections by the gays, by the bisexuals, by the pan-omni-whateversexuals. I’ve never spoken on it publicly and rarely do privately. The act of siloing me into any group is a noxious one. But it’s all still out there. Pictures slip past the SHIELD PR payoff crew, much to their chagrin. I couldn’t care less about that, even if it drives them regularly apeshit.

“Have you ever done this before?” I ask.

He sputters, either oblivious to his own unskillful flirtation or in deep denial of it. “Of course I have.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“I have! I swear. Just... not in this league.”

I smile. “You trying to level up or something?”

He gives a laugh that doesn’t fit his getup, warm and endearing and self-conscious. “No. Just feeling bold I guess. Or stupid.” He shakes his head and looks down at the countertop. “Yeah, pretty sure it’s that one.” He smears his palm over his face and lets out a long, rickety breath.

It’s so genuine. So painfully unsure. All of the jock bro affect is gone, and I see him for what he is now — a small town closet case, maybe from Montana or Kansas, a nice Christian boy, the kind of boy with a steady girlfriend who never really understood why he didn’t like her quite the same way she liked him. It would take going off to the city, breaking up with her in the middle of his second semester, to realize what he really was. Maybe he haunted the gay scene for a while before chickening out, too overwhelmed by the raw, hungry energy of it.

I really shouldn’t tease him. Not this one.

“Do you live nearby?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I drain the rest of my G&T. “Do you wanna go?”

He mutters “Oh my—” under his breath and drinks the melt water from his ice cubes. “Yeah. Of course.” The corners of his mouth dip, and he casts me a sidelong look. “Really?”

“Really.”

We walk a very heterosexual distance away from each other on the way to his apartment. He moves with his hands crammed in his pockets, laughing a little too loudly as he tells me that his roommate is home and that we have to be quiet if we do it. _If_ , like I’m gonna get up there and take one look at him and roll myself out the door.

Outside the building, I stop him, backing him up to the wall. I don’t touch him, but I drag my eyes over his body in a very unsubtle way. No, not running or lacrosse. This one is a swimmer, maybe a diver. The thought of him poised on a high board, a crafted assembly of well-formed curves and angles steadying for an elegant drop off the edge, is unexpectedly arousing.

“Last chance,” I say. “You’ve done it before?”

He swallows. “Yeah.”

“You gonna bottom?” I don’t think I even need to ask this one, but I always do, just in case I’m wrong.

His chin ducks, mouth curling into a frown. Jesus Christ. I should turn around now, tell him it’s been a nice night but duty calls or one of the other hundred lines I have for moments like these. But I don’t. I touch my finger below his chin and lift it back up. I let my thumb brush the sharp line of that jaw, just for a second, then pull my hand back to my side.

“You got stuff?” I ask.

He gives a shallow nod.

“All right. Shall we?”

His room is a collage of stereotypes — Georgetown gear, a couple of trophies on the floor, wedged in the corner, Jesus dangling off a goddamn cross. But it’s still inviting in its impeccable neatness, the way I keep my apartment. I don’t miss the thoughtful arrangement of the space and the small Roy Lichtenstein _Crying Girl_ print, the single item that violates both the color scheme and the thematic unity of the place.

Caleb stands in the middle of the room and pulls off his ball cap. His hair is a little longer than I thought it might be, and he shoves his hand into it to push it back when it flops into his face.

“Sorry it’s not that great,” he says.

“I like it.”

I step forward and he stiffens. I lay both hands on his shoulders and give them a little squeeze. “You still wanna?”

“Yeah,” he says, barely.

I take his shirt by the hem, and he raises his arms so I can pull it over his head. I let it drop to the floor and watch his naked chest, heaving like a chinchilla’s. I run my hands down his arms and he shudders. When I move to the button of his jeans, he sucks in a sharp breath.

“What do you do when you ask that and they say they wanna top, too?” he says as I unzip him.

“Arm wrestle for it.”

His eyes get big.

“I’m kidding,” I assure him. “It doesn’t happen often. Some concede. Some I leave.”

He huffs a tiny laugh, and I push his jeans down until they pool around his feet. Despite the obvious nerves, he’s so hard, just from this. I think of Steve in the shower. What it means. If it means something like this. The thought is errant and curious.

“You can touch me,” I say.

He does. He’s trembling, his touch light enough at first to tickle. I make myself not flinch.

“I promise I don’t bite.”

That earns a smile, a tenuous one, but one that solidifies as he finds some confidence. I let him undress me and finish undressing himself. He’s gentle, careful, with none of the starving sloppiness that charges so many nights like these. He doesn’t gawk at my arm or the skin around it or try to count my scars. He smooths his hands over me, lips parted, breaths coming fast between them, thumbs dipping into the ridges between my abs, tracing the lines at my hips that slope down toward my cock, cataloging the shape of me with his fingertips.

I go real nice and easy with him, just in case he's lying to me. I fuck him face to face so I can keep a good eye on him, so I can kiss him, so he can grab onto me, if he needs something to keep him steady. He’s not very good at kissing, so I take a strong lead, slow him down. He needs to learn, and I guess this is what I do now. He moans and gasps and utters streams of almost-profanity, almost-blasphemy, _oh my gosh, holy crap_ , as if Jesus was actually watching him sin. He clutches my back and my arms, digging his fingertips into the contrasting materials that I’m made of. My shoulder starts to burn from propping myself up, but it’s nice to make him feel good. It’s nice to watch him come, his voice cracking on the edge of something more powerful that seems to be trying to push through him. It doesn't take long at all, and I let myself follow shortly after, perhaps at the expense of some piece of my reputation as a lover.

When he comes back from the bathroom after, he looks like he’s about to collapse to pieces onto the floor. So I pull him into my arms. He goes limp in them and presses his face into my neck.

What a fucking liar. This would usually piss me off, but tonight it doesn’t. I’m not sure why.

I think I’m probably disappointing sometimes. A lot of people who I go home with probably expect some sort of superheroic fuck, whatever that is. I fuck with skill but rarely with that kind of bravado. Some people just want a daddy. I try to be the things they want from me, but sometimes I’m just too tired.

I hope I could be what he wanted. It’s an embarrassing and self-indulgent hope. I always hope to do at least the important things right. But I’m not sure what he was looking for, if it was this or someone to do him rough, a smirking rogue, a tough guy, I don’t know. I don’t know what he expected this to be. I don’t delight in this like some people do, but it doesn’t feel like an offense against him. I hope to whoever will listen that he doesn’t regret me.

“You didn’t just come here because you felt sorry for me, did you?” he mumbles into my skin.

“No.” I run my fingers through his hair so he knows I mean it. It’s well-conditioned and cared for, soft and just long enough to play with.

There’s a rumble deep in his chest.

I stay a little while longer, until it feels like he’s knit himself back together a bit. And it’s not just for him, I suppose. My own body sinks into the mattress as an unsettling weakness percolates through my muscles. This was hardly an endurance test, but it’s drained me still.

He sits on the edge of his bed as I dress, back in his underwear and nothing else.

“You okay?” I give my shirt a tug, setting it right against me.

He nods. “Yeah.”

Good. God, that’s good.

Before I leave, I lean down and press a small kiss to his head. “You’ll figure it out, don’t worry,” I tell him softly. “Believe me, I know.”

It’s as much as I will ever give to anyone like this, as big of a piece of myself as I’ll ever leave behind.

His fingers find the skin of my flesh arm and trail down it as I step away. “Yeah, I will.”

This, I think I can believe.

—

Steve is still awake when I get home. He’s rummaging around the kitchen, popping tortilla chips into his mouth from the open bag in his hand.

“Hey,” he greets as my keys clank into the bowl. “How was work?”

“Not bad. Just a lot going on right now.”

He gives a solid, acknowledging nod, then pauses.

He sniffs. His brows wrinkle.

He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. And I excuse myself to bed.

—

“All right,” I say, plopping myself onto the couch next to Steve. “What do you got for me today?”

I try not to sound as tired as I feel after narrowly escaping an inhumane day of back-to-back meetings with some of my life force still intact. I’m drained from my day, yes, but also from a steady accumulation of long and restless nights. I found a small consolation in feeding Satie into one of my ears while I lie in the dark. It scrapes away only the most piercing edges of my terror, enough to let me drift in and out of bouts of agitated sleep that’s smeared with dreams I haven’t had in years. I try not to let myself think of them in my waking hours. I already gave so much of my life to that, and I’ll be damned if I give them one second more, if I can help it. But most nights I don’t even want to go back to sleep, if it means going back there.

And I’m not the only one with rough sleep, apparently. Two nights ago, I was ripped from one of my few dreamless bouts by the sound of Steve startling awake with a choked off shout, panting as he stumbled to the kitchen and downed two full glasses of water standing over the sink. Then we played the apology game from across the apartment until he settled back into bed. We lay in the dark for a long time, both aware that the other was awake, and I’m ashamed to say that I was even a little glad for it, because feeling him so acutely there did more for me than two ears full of Satie ever could. I’ve been too scared to ask what it was all about.

Steve’s assignment today was disco, and many of my nerves have been gathering around whether or not he will like it. I don’t know why it’s so important to me, why I imagine myself stricken by the possibility of his disapproval. I have a whole playlist dedicated to it, spliced off from the others, songs I save for when I want to explode out into the world but don’t want to cause any damage. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still hunt it out in clubs, both here and in New York. It’s imminently danceable, the kind of music that rips you from yourself and throws your body into motion, whether you’ve got a taste for it or not. It’s impossible not to at least tap your foot or bob your head to “Stayin’ Alive.” I’d like to meet a person who doesn’t, but I know they don’t exist.

Steve’s mouth blossoms into a wide grin. “I’m so sad I missed this stuff.”

I wasn’t expecting to feel quite this relieved, or to have my own sentiments echoed so assuredly. “Really? You like it?”

“Oh, yeah.”

I scoot a little closer to peer at the long list he’s scrawled into a notebook I gave him. This was another assignment: start writing things down. Things you like, things you want to do, things you want to know. I’ve seen the way he scrawls in it, how often, how diligently, sometimes with a fierceness that makes my blood go cold.

Steve tips his song list to me, and I spot some of my favorites immediately. Something blossoms in me, too.

But then I wave him and his notebook off. “You know what? Just play the ones you like best.”

Steve leaps off the couch and strides to my sound system with the confidence of a man who invented the technology himself. He fiddles around for a bit, bent at the waist, the thick muscle of his ass straining the fabric of my sweatpants.

The beats fill the room, the roll of thunder, and I can’t keep the grin off of my face as Steve turns to me and his hip begins to kick out with the beat.

_Hi, hi, we’re your weather girls, and have we got neeeewwws for you_

I cover my face with my hands but still watch him through my fingers. I’m not sure what I’m trying to hide from him, but oh my _God_.

He mouths the words: _Get ready, all you lonely girls, and leave those umbrellas at home_

Which means that he listened to it enough times that he’s memorized the lyrics. Or maybe this is something else I’ve forgotten that I once learned about him.

Steve beckons me with his index fingers. I couldn’t imagine a world where I don’t accept this invitation.

And as the song kicks into gear, he starts to dance, bare feet shifting and tapping on the floor, shoulders swaying in perfect rhythm. I don’t know where he got the idea that he can’t dance, because if what he’s doing isn’t right, I don’t know what could be.

I move, too, edging closer to him with every note and him to me. I’m singing along, loud, I don’t know where it’s coming from, I was just losing my mind in a budget meeting 45 minutes ago, my life energy siphoning into the carpet with every advancing PowerPoint slide. But I feel it now, rising unstoppably from wherever it hides in me, pushing into my veins, drawing into my blood vessels.

_For the first time in history, it’s gonna start raining meeeeeennn—_

The chorus rings out from us, an explosion of aliveness maybe only paralleled by a really good firefight. This is dangerous in its own way maybe, the abandon, the magnetized force of bodies as they fall into step, and there are no steps, there’s no wrong way except to be still. Steve thrusts his hands up and belts out _Hallelujah_ like an evangelist.

I lean in with the beat, push out my voice, enunciating — _tall, blond_ then _dark and lean_ , _rough and tough and strong and mean,_ and Steve throws his head back in a full-bodied laugh, because who would wish for a mean guy to fall from the sky, it’s as absurd as the entire song.

We dance through until the end, a mere arm’s length apart. I stay myself from moving closer, because I don’t know where my control rests now, I can’t find it, I barely even think to look for it, but something in me knows better not to close this particular gap. I just don’t know what would happen if I did.

Even after it’s over, Steve is effervescent in a way I never remember seeing him on any dance floor, maybe feeling a little too kicked by the fate of his failed romantic endeavors, half-hearted as they all seemed to be from the start. He’s radiating it even as he turns to my iPod and finds the next song.

He seems happy. Just happy to be here. Just happy to be alive. Unburdened by his questions and his simmering, unspoken worries about the world I'm keeping from him. I want to freeze him here in time, freeze us both, cup my hand around this, a shimmering bubble that maybe I could shield from the wind for a while longer.

When the song starts, it takes appreciable restraint not to take him by the arm and pull him to the couch. I tell him to turn it off, motion him there instead, and grab my laptop from my bag. I’m careful as I pull up Youtube, angling the screen away from him. I’m still basking in what must be a final few days before I absolutely have to break the internet to him. He only knows it as an abstraction, thanks to an unfortunate suggestion to him from Harding that I really can’t blame her for.

It takes me a few minutes, but I finally find it. I press play and lean forward the way Steve does, hunched over the screen, fighting against a force that wants to drive me out of his line of sight.

The look of dawning recognition is slow but powerful. I wonder if he’s like so many, who never realized “You Make Me Feel” is sung by a man. And not just any man, but a gay one dressed in full makeup and a rainbow colored, sequined gown, sashaying around a stage, lip syncing to his own song.

I fall quiet then, inside and outside. I watch Steve closely and catch him throwing glimpses at me.

He doesn’t ask, but he doesn’t need to. He only needs to read me, to gauge my tacit acceptance of a man dancing in a dress. I wasn’t really in that world back then, whatever it looked like in the thirties and forties, but I was sometimes careless enough to accidentally land in it. I think I was on the receiving end of it at least a couple times, in hindsight, but I was stupid to it, blind to it, passing off any reciprocal warmth I felt as a general desire for people, to be buried in a crowded room, to lose myself in them, to find fragments of myself in their light. I see it now in the kind of light Steve shines over me, brighter than all the rest combined, powerful enough to reveal me and crush me into dust. This is the language everything seemed to be spoken in, silent glances, careful tests, anxious moments spent while they pinged and returned. I thought myself pretty goddamn clever back then, but I was never quite clever enough to figure out my own parts.

I wonder then how closely Steve has looked at my books while I’ve been away, if he found the packed collection of _Giovanni’s Room, Maurice, Gravity’s Rainbow, Ethan of Athos._ Not that he would recognize what they are, not unless he’s been deep-diving and re-shelving before I get home. I wonder if he’s somehow revealed those pieces of me too, quietly and without my knowing. Apparently I’m not much more clever now than I was at 21.

But our watching eases into something congenial, another pin stick on the map of us. It’s like when we were younger, when only Steve was still an outcast after I’d crawled out from underneath the social curse of my birth. It feels like us leaned into the voice of Orson Welles narrating the impending Martian invasion, both entirely convinced it was just a show but also breathlessly terrified that it might be real.

I let the video play until the end, stopping it before YouTube can autoplay something off-script.

Steve is the one who finally flops back onto the couch. It’s hard to name the look on his face, something between contented and disrupted, a loose weave of both draped over the surface of him. He doesn’t say anything for a while, then, finally:

“I wanna go out.” His gaze shifts to my face and holds there.

I stiffen. “Yeah, I’m just— We will. I promise.”

It feels inhumane then, suddenly, the way I’m keeping him locked up like this. An act of protection perverted by its author.

“I’ve just got this thing on Saturday,” I say. “We can go out after.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Mandatory fun,” I say cryptically. “Morale building exercise. Obstacle course. Total bullshit but all in good spirit.”

The Phillips Cup, later known as the Chester Cup, now The Chet. There’s no actual cup involved, but there is a discretionary paid day off for the team that gets everyone through the fastest. But it’s also a spectator sport, with me and now Romanoff as the main attractions of either team we get randomly assigned to. It was particularly special last year when Romanoff led Team Carter to victory while Team Stark trailed by nine small seconds. Our teams win not because we have any capacity to carry our people to victory single handedly, but because our mere presence seems to pull everyone else with us. I’m not planning to lose this year. I can’t.

Steve’s eyes slip closed for a few moments. “Good. I’m ready.”

And I feel fundamentally unready, for everything.

“What else you got in your notebook?” I ask. “Anything that we can put in our mouths?”

His blue eyes slide open. He looks at me quizzically, like I accidentally slipped into Russian, the way I do when I’m apoplectically irate or raging through traffic with a dire need to disparage somebody’s mother. I lift my eyebrows to check that it was comprehensible.

“Yeah,” he says, sitting up. He picks up his notes from the coffee table, hand passing through his hair, like Caleb trying to brush away his own nature. “Lemme take a look.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader. 
> 
> Additional warnings at the end.

“Five minutes!”

It’s Hill through a bullhorn, updating us on Team Carter’s start time. We’ve already assembled at the line, crackling with excitement, exchanging good-natured barbs in shouting voices with the members of Team Stark waiting on the sidelines, ready to follow us through the course. Team Stark won the coin toss and already ran through with a solid assembly that included Romanoff and Harding and Kirkpatrick. They had a good run, no serious injuries, and an admirable showing of teamwork.

It’s a pretty sportsmanly endeavor over all, despite the competitiveness. We followed them down the course and watched and clapped and shouted encouragements. There was, of course, attention on Romanoff as she negotiated every obstacle with finesse. She’s more of a team player than you might expect, yanking and boosting people up trench walls, little readable comments like _c’mon, you got this, nice work, easy does it_. I watched Harding, too, yelling her name through cupped hands, earning a couple grins and fist pumps. If she wasn’t widely known to be a lesbian, we would undoubtedly be accused of something untoward. But even if she wasn’t, I never mess around in the work pool. Especially not the junior field officer pool. Not even I’m that big of a shitbag.

My hand drifts down over my stomach, the churning and sourness sharpening from where it snuck up on me last night. I’m sure loading ten ibuprofen on top of it right before this didn’t do much to help things.

“Ready to win, boss?”

Coulson appears in my periphery. I never cease to be amazed at how everyone feels out of their office wear, or the way we look gaggled together in our PT uniforms. It’s half of the enjoyment of today, witnessing people like Romanoff and Coulson and, I suppose, me, dressed up like regular people. It’s humanizing to see leg hair and sock-and-shoe configurations, to sort into categories who chooses the summer PT uniform and who chooses the winter. I tried the winter long sleeves and pants one year and nearly keeled over from the intense heat generated by them.

“Hell yeah, I’m ready.” I charge false confidence into my voice, a skill I excel at after years of faking it til I suppose that I made it. Whatever that means.

I’ve run through my strategy several times over already, starting last night as a way to distract myself from an impinging feeling of madness. It’s not a very long course, easy to learn by heart. I’ve also learned through an iterative process not to waste energy sprinting out the gate. You conserve and use your speed on the leaps you have to make up walls or over water. You save your upper body energy for the ledge hang and the brutal series of ten rings you have to monkey your way across. You save your greatest burst, your greatest everything, for the end, when you’ve got almost nothing in your body except shaking exhaustion, when it’s time to throw yourself — sometimes literally — over the finish line.

“How is he?” Coulson asks.

“Good. I told him about you. About your cards.”

Coulson’s got a lot of soft spots, but this might be the softest, his childlike devotion to this. “And?”

Steve laughed when I told him. Shook his head and chuckled at another block stacked on an already wobbling tower of merch cast in his likeness. “He’ll do it. I’ll probably bring him in next week.”

I still cannot see that road ahead of me, cast in fog, treacherous. I have no idea how I will bring him, bring both of us, from here to there.

Coulson smiles, as easy and boyish as his collection. “I look forward to it.”

I admittedly kind of do, too, if only to see Coulson’s face.

Hill is back on the bullhorn.

“Okay, agents: On your marks.”

We press our toes to the starting line.

“Get set.”

“Go!”

It’s almost a euphoria, driving my nerves into the muscles of my legs, cutting through the breezy afternoon air like a blade. There’s a group that runs almost lock-step with me, a cluster of a lot of newbies, ones told by the old guard that if they stay close enough, maybe they’ll get a boost or a hoist from me. It’s a _thing_ , Harding told me with a dismissive snort.

There’s a six foot wall at the base of a tall A-frame cargo net. It’s already lined with cupped palms waiting for me to step in, and some agents are already mounted on the wall offering hands to reach for.

I don’t need them.

I fall into a dead run and jump, hooking my forearms on the top of the wall. I catch a handful of net with my left hand and yank myself up with nearly 400 pounds of flexive force.

So far, so fine. This burn is an old and familiar one.

I twist around and keep my grip tight, reaching out my flesh hand to give someone else a lift. At least three people are reaching for me, how the hell do I choose, I can’t, so I duck my head and wrap my fingers around the first solid thing to grip me. He’s a big guy, tall and thick with a good-natured grin. He whoops as I yank him up, launching him belly-down onto the net.

“Oh my God!” he says, laughing and sprawled over the ropes.

I’d stay and fling agents like this all day, if it wasn’t prohibited. So I start my climb, dead in the middle of the net, picked specifically for its slack and instability. I do need a little bit of a challenge sometimes. It’s barely anything as I bear-crawl up all three-and-a-half stories of it and throw myself over the top.

I keep my pace fairly slow as I run to the trench ahead. On the sidelines, Team Stark moves along with me, but I want them to move with everyone else, too. There’s only vanity in cutting ahead, stealing any support, any energy, the rest of my team might get from the cheering.

I drop the easy six feet into the trench, absorbing the shock. I plant myself there, cupping my hands into a step for the first agent that gets to me. She’s small, so small that I have to be careful not to toss her out the other side and pancake her on the dirt. And though it would be easy to jump and drag myself up this wall, too, a few agents are urging me to use them as steps and lifts. Sometimes it’s the best thing, to just let other people help you. Still, it doesn’t feel good to give them my full weight — it takes four of them to get me over. One gives me a good clap on the arm when I get back on my feet, a total reflex of camaraderie that I’m almost overwhelmingly glad for.

The plastic tube crawl is loud with the cheerful bangs of our colleagues from the outside. I’m gritting my teeth against the sharp burn in my left shoulder as I reach and move. Not good. Not when it’s from just this.

Because the next challenge is one of the hardest.

Now, I’ve hung off of a lot of ledges, usually in mortal peril, but never this painfully. It’s a slow, daunting, sliding march by the tips of your fingers, people dropping from it like flies with shouts and yelps. Sliding my hands over the wood board, left, right, left, right, I think of Steve dangling off the edge of my loft, how easily he pulled his enormous body up, how swiftly and easily he did just this, back and forth, bare feet hovering high over my floor. I curse under my breath and imagine myself as him, borrow him in the abstract way you take strength from someone far away. Thank God it’s enough to get me to the drop at the end.

The razor wire, dummy rifle low-crawl is rigged like a basic training task. It usually takes me back to Fort McCoy, but today it takes me to a state of acute awareness of how shitty I’m moving. How the muzzle of my rubber gun is _this close_ to touching the dirt whenever my left side takes my weight. How everyone is watching me drag my sorry ass through the dirt, grimacing and slow, maybe even very disappointing. It’s enough to push me through, to give me a burst of fortitude at the end, where I pass the rifle off to one of the volunteers for them to rush to the start again.

The next two obstacles are nearly a breeze. It’s simple enough to favor my right arm on the over-water rope swing. Then I hit the first balance beam at a near sprint, making quick work of it, leaping to the next, and finishing strong. I used to have a deep, inner chuckle at how much easier it is to do it when the beam is not actively collapsing over hot plumes of fire.

I find it hard to find the humor today, because the worst is just up ahead. Ten rings. Jesus, it’s an inside joke I’m only now comprehending. Also not very funny. Even the strongest are straining on this one, arms reaching for one ring and the next, legs kicking the air, more than half of them losing their grip or fucking up their timing and dropping to the ground.

I pump myself up with a good hard run toward it, a chance to load myself with maybe enough adrenaline to anesthetize me a little. I feel an odd constriction in my chest, the stifling weight of something I can’t see pressing down on it, and there’s a nagging tickle of a cough that I let out as I leap to grab the first ring. It’s agony as I lock my left hand around it and drop my bodyweight. I bite down on the sounds trying to edge out of me as I swing from ring to ring to ring, God, are there more than ten? Did they add one? Five? Drops of sweat slip down my face, the heat of cresting and incredible pain. The drop at the end feels substantial enough, desperate enough, that my knees almost collapse under me.

The sourness in my stomach turns into pure, swift-mounting nausea as I approach the base of the final obstacle. Another abomination of an angled wall, one you have to drag yourself up using a series of hand and footholds. And it shouldn't be that bad, my legs do so much of the work. But with every reach to the next hold, my vision starts to gray out. The only thing that keeps me from letting go and flying back down the wall is my fraying pride and the agents to my left and right doing it better than me. It probably looks like showboating when I let myself skid all the way down the other side, but it’s completely idiotic. And it’s the only way I’m getting off this fucking thing.

The crowd cheers.

I sprint.

I cross the finish line.

I stumble into the nearby tree line and am violently ill.

I gasp, reeling. I throw out my right hand and pray that it’ll land on the tree trunk that’s blotching in and out of my line of sight.

Jesus. Jesus fucking God.

“Little too much fun last night?”

My scoff is weak and wet with phlegm. I spit the taste of puke out of my mouth. “No.”

There is a tree there. It’s firm and strong against my palm. My arm buckles against my weight as I bear into it. The world warps as I crane my head over my shoulder at Romanoff.

She doesn’t look nearly as amused as she sounds. She looks... concerned.

I swallow back another wave of sickness, head lolling, my mouth filling with saliva that I can’t seem to spit out fast enough.

“You alright?” She asks this seriously.

“Fine.”

My stomach lurches. I gag and throw up again.

“Hey, are you okay?”

God damn it. Not her.

I force myself to stand for Harding, pushing against the tree trunk, still trying to catch my breath, choking back what’ll probably be just dry heaving now. I don’t think there’s anything left to come up.

My feet are unsteady as I turn to her. I clench my fingers into a fist. “I’m okay.”

Harding holds out a bottle of water for me. “Here.”

Romanoff looks on, arms crossed over her chest. Her stare passes between me and Harding, rooted firm to the ground underfoot. She’s not going anywhere. I really wish she would, but I don’t have the balls to tell her to get lost.

A sandpaper sensation scrapes along the back of my throat, and a rough, uncontrollable fit of coughing and retching doubles me over. It’s humiliating. This whole fucking thing is humiliating.

When it seems to be over, I right myself and reach out a trembling hand for the water Harding still has waiting for me. I can barely fumble the cap off, and it falls to the ground.

Romanoff catches it before I do, as she seems to uncannily catch nearly everything. Her attention lands on my arm, to the thin stream of blood rivuleting down my bicep. My t-shirt is damp with it.

“Shit,” I say under my breath.

“You want me to get the doc?” Harding asks. God, I hate the look in her eyes now, how soft they are as she bears witness to this.

“No, it’s fine. Really.” I jerk my head toward the parking lot. “I’m just— I’m gonna go.”

“Want me to go with you?”

It’s so sweet that I almost say yes.

“No. Thanks.”

A little smile tips the corner of her mouth. “You won.”

I’m not sure how I can be relieved right now, but I am. I’m so relieved that I would drop to my knees here, quake and heave in the new grass, if I was only alone.

“Good.” I look to Romanoff, try to school a look of victory on my face. But it probably can’t pass for any more than a weak click of my jaw. “Better luck next year.”

Romanoff does not smile.

—

I watch myself in my bathroom mirror as I slip the fingers of my right hand underneath the collar of my PT shirt. I’m already wincing as I feel the tug of cotton adhered to my body. I'm pretty sure I freaked out a couple skeleton crew agents in the hall on the way here, possibly from the blood, or possibly from the sickly, blanched face I see reflected now. I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be at the picnic, celebrating my team, celebrating all of us, making strained small talk around mouthfuls of potato salad.

I take a deep breath. I pull.

There’s a sticky velcro sound as I rip fabric from flesh. I grit out a low sound and clamp it down hard. When I pull my shirt off, an act of pained contortion, there’s a thick band of scabbing along the seam running from my shoulder down my pectoral, places where the skin and everything underneath is tearing away from the implant. There are fresh bleeds now, sliding along the semi-clotted mess, gravitating down my chest in thin, persistent trails.

“Shit. Shit.”

I bend to open the cupboard below my sink. Drops of blood smack heavily onto the linoleum between my feet. Thank God I’ve learned never to keep my first aid kit too far from reach, a product of frequent self-doctoring after missions. One side of my left leg is painted road-rash pink from my reckless slide down the last obstacle.

I step into the shower and upend a bottle of peroxide, dumping whatever is left over the wound, hissing at the sharp, bubbling sting of it. It foams and sizzles, hideous and raw.

But something about the burn is satisfying, like so much pain became over the years. It’s a concentrating force, yanking me from my spiraling thoughts about what this means, what it’s already said, what is coming next.

I do a one-handed bandage job on it, adhering pads of gauze with white tape everywhere I can reach. The back isn’t quite as bad, a small blessing in the core of this shit show. My usual gray shirt should cover any seepage well enough for me to pass for fine until I get home.

Home. Fuck me. I can’t. I just can’t.

I drop down on my ill-used guest sofa and ease myself back against the cushion. If I close my eyes, I’m not sure when they’ll open again, so I fight against my exhaustion. I promised Steve. Jesus, I promised him we would go out.

Is this what it’s going to be like now? My body tearing itself apart, my colleagues and subordinates quietly watching me wither and retch and crawl around like a pathetic has-been? Is this where all of my work has led me, a parabola whose peak you can only see when you’re sliding uncontrollably down the other side of it?

I need— I need to work. I need to take care of things. I need to start planning. I need to push myself off this fucking couch and… work.

My fingertips are still quivering when I open my laptop and check my emails. There are a couple near-911s from upstate that almost-urgently need my attention, some cadet with a DUI, he’s been such a good trainee so far, can we please do a waiver, fuck that. I’ll answer no because I always do, and they’ll override me like they always do, what a hypocrite, they might say in closed quarters, who is he to judge.

And they’re right. But I will still say no until I can’t say no to anything anymore.

This I can do. This I will do. Just for a little while longer.

—

It’s nearly 20:00 by the time I drag myself up the stairs, every step mountainous. There’s a gleeful shout from a couple floors down, a man and a woman, either going or coming from a night out together. I snort as I jam two separate keys into two separate locks, turning them simultaneously.

I expect my entrance to be accompanied by music, as it has been the last few days. I’ve been making a better effort to keep Steve in the loop, texting him my movements, telling him when I’m on the way home. It’s strange to have someone looped so closely into my life now, someone waiting at home for me. It’s not an experience I’ve had since I was 26. Steve has been greeting me with his favorite songs as I arrive, the volume cranked, sometimes dancing, sometimes on the couch, swinging his foot. He seesaws between states of urgent movement and consuming quiet, his eyes fixed on the ceiling or, more often, out to the street.

Things he likes: Stevie Wonder, Queen, James Brown, ABBA, The B-52s, Joe Cocker, Garth Brooks, Gordon Lightfoot, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Supremes, REM.

But today, there is no music. There’s only Steve on the edge of the couch, his shoulders rolled forward, his head heavy, forearms resting on his knees.

He’s sniffling, and I wonder what he’s been reading now. Is it selfish to hope that maybe he read _Wuthering Heights_? Or maybe he read _Flowers for Algernon_. Maybe he read _The Time Traveler’s Wife_. This is the sound of one of those books.

“You okay?” I toe off my running shoes and move toward him.

There’s a noise from him, a swallow so laborious I can hear it from halfway across the room. When he finally speaks, his voice is thick.

“Were you ever gonna tell me?”

I freeze. “Tell you what?”

Steve clears his throat. “I, ah, went for a walk today. I wanted a mocha.”

No.

“I walked up Rhode Island… parkway? Street? I can’t remember, but I found a library.”

The Shaw. No, no, no.

“And they were very nice.” There’s a bitter smile curling his lips. “A nice lady showed me how to use the computer.”

Fuck.

“So I looked. I Googled. And I read. A lot. And I—” His voice catches. He swallows again. “I read about you.”

_Fuck._

Steve lifts his head now. Turns it toward me. His eyes are red, full and wet. He shoves his chin forward and then back. “Bucky… Jesus Christ.”

My hands curl into fists at my sides. He knows. He knows now.

And God _damn_ him.

“I told you we were gonna go out,” I snap. God damn it, this is _exactly_ what I’ve been trying to protect him from. “Why couldn’t you just fucking wait?”

Steve’s eyebrows arch high. “That’s your answer? That’s what you have to say?”

I— I don’t know. I don’t know what I have to say. Days and days of careful planning, curating my words, tossing out the bad ones, painting a gruesome picture in fresh, new oils, cool and dispassionate, assuring, I never knew how to make it right. I never figured it right. I don’t know still.

“I mean, what...” Steve tries. “Why...”

His words lose their momentum, drying up in the air between us. I shrug. I shake my head.

“You lied to me. I asked you, point blank, and you _lied_. Since when do you lie to me?”

Oh, I dunno, since you died and I did too.

I lock my shoulders down so they don’t lift again. “What the hell was I supposed to say?”

“The truth!”

I sputter. “Oh, so, like, ‘Hi, Steve, welcome back. By the way, while you were gone, I was captured and tortured and brainwashed and became a Hydra operative for forty years. Y’know, the usual.’ Is that what you wanted me to say to you?”

Steve’s hand lands on the arm of the sofa, fingertips clawing into the flesh of it. He snarls. “How long did you think you were gonna keep this from me? Forever?”

“I was gonna tell you—”

“When? After you kept me locked up for a whole goddamn year?”

“Look—”

“No, _you_ look! How could you keep this from me? How could you sit there and say nothing? I was—” Steve thrusts his hand at the couch cushion next to him. “God, I was eating croissants, right here, and you just— kept this from me?”

A blistering, familiar feeling rises in my chest, shaking my heart. The erratic, ecstatic hum of rage.

“And that _thing_ in your closet — what the fuck? ‘Something I used to wear?’” Steve huffs out a sharp breath and shakes his head. “How could you keep this from me? You think I’m some child who can’t handle the truth?”

“Well, fucking clearly you can’t.”

“I can, if you just tell me.”

“Okay,” I say, nodding. “Okay, fine. You wanna know shit? You so desperate to know shit? Here we go. I’ll give you some facts. How about this— did you read this? How we really ended the war? How we dropped atomic bombs on Japan and killed 200,000 civilians, knowing the Japanese were gonna surrender anyway?”

Steve’s mouth slides open. Yeah, guess he didn’t get to that cheerful little gem yet.

“Or you wanna know about the Korean War, just five years after? Or the Vietnam War after that, 58,000 young American men dead? How about Panama and Grenada and Lebanon and Kosovo? How about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ten years running because some fuckheads crashed two planes into the middle of downtown New York City?”

I’m not exactly yelling, but I think it might be better if I was. I’m blunt, factual, firm and warning, like I’m giving a presentation to my cadets about all the ways they can get killed in an urban landscape. The blind spots. The fatal funnels. The uncanny valley of battle on your own sacred land. And I feel a rush of pure, distilled schadenfreude as Steve’s face contorts from the force of history smashing into him.

I take a step forward. I feel every square centimeter of contact between the floor and my foot, the way I feel everything when my blood is light and agile and ready. I know how I look. I’ve seen it in the eyes of the almost-dead. It is fearful. I am that.

“And you wanna know what Hitler did with the Jews? Did you read that on your little field trip?” I hiss it through my clenched jaw, I don’t know how long I’ve been holding onto this for him. “He gassed six million of us to death and threw us in fucking ovens. So, yeah, it _was_ fucking true.”

I stalk to where I dropped my bag by the front door and yank my laptop out. It authenticates with my face as I walk it over and slam it down on the coffee table. Steve sits as still as a startled buck, his attention fixed, primed. I spear a hand toward the computer.

“You wanna look shit up? Be my guest. Explode your brain all over the fucking apartment. I’m done trying to save you. Do whatever the fuck you want. Go wherever the fuck you want. You’re a free man now.”

I grab the doorknob so aggressively that I nearly crush it, and the door slams hard enough behind me to rattle the pans hanging over the stove. I barrel down the stairs, heart now slamming against the clenching walls of my chest. I burst out into the street and I move and even though I’m fast I’m not fast enough to outpace the scene in my mind, Steve bent over some cheap library computer, fingers pressed against his mouth, eyes wide with horror and disgust, reading everything, knowing everything, it’s all there on Wikipedia, it took me two days to read it, sweating through my shirts, leaving and coming back and leaving again, and there’s so much more, even an idiot could find it — lists and names; redacted fragments of protocols; pictures of me bare, dead-eyed, hurting.

I let out a tremulous breath and clutch my hand over my sternum. It’s a thousand mandatory fun events all converging on my ribcage at once. It tunnels my vision but sharpens my suspicions, and I swear I feel someone behind me, the nagging drag of a tail. I don’t think Steve would, I don’t think Steve could, after all the shit I just said. And I know the feel of him trailing behind me in a wide V-formation, me at the apex, rifle ready, rough and stoic as the seas of cruciferous trees we waded through. And this is not him.

I whip around and scream down the street, into the dark.

“Fuck off, Veejay!”

I tear Updesh’s cover apart — Jesus, if he’s even there at all. If I didn’t look insane before, I certainly do now, screaming at someone that nobody can see like a raving fucking _meshugener_. Washington isn’t New York: this kind of thing scares people here. This is the thing that makes people shake their heads behind Fury’s back — this maniac, this wild animal, how could he think this is a good idea?

But I still want to keep screaming. I want to scream the way I used to in the hospital, thrashing out of a nightmare, punching orderlies in the face, hurtling furniture against the wall until they put me on a round-the-clock lorazepam drip and parked me in front of a TV for eight months. I didn’t scream after that, but sometimes I feel it all still trapped in me. I want to scream for the past, all the time I lost, the choices I lost, the violence billed as mercy, the lies I was made to believe. I want to scream for the days that are coming. I want to scream at Steve for being alive.

I want to scream because I’m falling apart. I want to scream because I’m terrified.

Instead, I keep dragging one foot in front of the other, southward. A car full of kids honks and yells “USA! USA!” and at least it’s not _you belong in a gulag_ or _Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent_ or _fuck you murderer_.

I hit the first patch of green at the cusp of the National Mall. I find a couple of tall bushes and drop down on the ground behind them, invisible from the streets, less likely to tempt some good Samaritan into calling an ambulance. Just a little existential crisis. Nothing to see here.

Through my shirt, I touch around the places I bandaged earlier. Some of the tape is starting to come up around my collar bone. I haven’t noticed if my healing has been compromised yet. I don’t exactly know how it works, what pieces of my DNA are starting to come unglued, what processes are starting to reverse or corrupt or whatever the proper verb is. I’m sure Tony explained what he thinks is going on, but apparently it’s not intuitive to listen closely to the recipe for your own demise.

I grunt as I lower myself onto the grass, splaying out on it like an unmade snow angel. I replay what I imagine I might have looked like, staggering through the city in half a PT uniform and a blood-stained t-shirt. The SHIELD PR team will have a busy day tomorrow. _Captain America: Unhinged. “Captain America”: Fraud, Lunatic. Captain America: Time to Pass the Shield Back_.

That last one… it’s really not a bad idea. It’s not the first time it’s crossed my mind, but it is the most desperate time. And yet, as I circle the thought, put a keen eye on it, something like calm begins to unclench me.

I close my eyes and drape my forearm over them. God. I’ve needed this all day. It’s one of those needs you don’t know you have until the cracks around your seams start to slowly fill, slowly drowning you in relief. I feel around in my pockets with my free hand, but I must have dropped my phone by the bowl. With my keys. It’s a thrilling, unencumbered freedom, to be loose in the world like this. My metal fingers brush along the skin of my thigh. I’m here.

But this relief is a transient one. Piece by piece, fragments of conversation come back to me. Not just words, but his face. The hurt. The betrayal. The… was it fear? Anger? Sadness? I’m usually pretty good at reading people, but there’s some block with this, my own feelings too dense to clearly see through. And I can’t really pin those, either. I wake up most days without Hydra hanging off of me. I may even forget about their existence entirely. Some days, I even remember the stuff that wasn’t so bad. Maybe I remember Karpov’s stained tea mug, his air of respectability, the respect he had for me, the way he’d slip me packs of smokes, the grainy football matches we would watch on a tiny TV. Maybe I remember running my teams, the praise, the very singular chill of a Russian winter.

I suppose I forget. I forget what Steve saw, what it’s like to look upon the sum of me with fresh eyes.

I could have handled this better.

I enter into a series of negotiations with myself about going back. I could head back to work for a while, flag down a cab, hop on the subway. But one generally needs money for those things. I guess I could walk. It’s not like I need my ID to get through the gate. I could start combing through applications for the next training cycle. I could crash on my cot and actually sleep for a change.

But I can’t run from this forever. I can’t run from any of this forever. It’s overcome me, picked me up and sucked me into its current, and I’m still kicking my feet, paddling my arms as if I’m still moving under my own steam. It’s something only fools do. Definitely not something that friends do. I need to go back, and I need to fix this. I’m not sure how I can, if I can at all, but nobody has taken my trying from me. Not yet.

I give myself a countdown. It’s me on the bullhorn this time, yelling inside my own head.

On your marks. Get set.

I press my thumb and forefinger against my eyelids and groan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warning: Vomiting


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

For the second time tonight, I open the door to my apartment. Or I try to, anyway. Steve has locked himself in, per my grave and repetitive instruction. But it means that I have to knock and stand outside in the hall, sheepish and fidgeting, until he appears in the doorway. He looks as worried as I feel, frowning, eyes wide and then growing heavier. Steve’s head drifts to the side with a long exhalation of what I think might be relief.

He steps back and I enter, kicking off my running shoes at the door. The locks click behind me, and there is a sequence of beeps as he sets the alarm.

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” Steve says.

“I almost didn’t.”

He passes me as he makes his way back to the couch. His shoulders are slack, weight shifting heavily from one foot to the other as he moves. I really fucked this one up.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “For everything.”

There’s a few moments of hesitation before he lowers himself to sit. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not. I should have told you the day after you came home.”

I sniff the air. There’s a smell of something recently cooked, some kind of meat, a little burned and generously seasoned.

Steve gives a limp shrug. “Yeah, you should have. But I see why you didn’t.”

Well. At least I get that.

I move forward and take a seat on the edge of the ottoman, facing him. “I know it’s a lot. I didn’t know how to break it to you.”

“I just didn’t wanna find out like that.” Pain etches his face as he looks away. “It was horrible.”

“I know it was.”

A heavy quiet falls between us. I want to fill it with more apologies, with promises, with heaps of assurances. I’m not sure if this is the moment to follow my instincts or to channel Harding, let Steve absorb it, let the horror seep into both of us. But God, I’m just so fucking sick of it sometimes. So sick of this pallor that’s been painted over every inch of my life, the soft looks, the rigorous defense of my crimes on the internet, even the sprawling leeway I enjoy in my occupation. I can’t ever seem to crawl out from underneath my own pitiful backstory.

“It was a long time ago. And I’ve done a lot of work. A lot of therapy.”

After Peggy sprang me from my miserable inpatient stay, Tony stepped in and hired a specialist to see me every day, for hours and hours, my recovery her sole occupation for an entire year. Dr. Blum re-taught me the nuances of being a human, slicing through the acting job I’d been doing since the late ‘40s and peeling it away. By all cursory assessment, I could walk and talk in the world just fine, order food at a restaurant, negotiate my way around the subway system, hold my own in basic conversation. But it was always something of a parody, my tone slightly off, my posture a little too rigid, my movements a little too skittish, my facial expressions fifteen degrees from where a normal person’s should be. Never enough to break my cover, not once, but decidedly unnatural. And I never did fully relearn the trust part. I can only apply it in thin, uneven patches, reserved for those who have earned it over long hauls of consistency or, like with Harding, for people who just feel right. You can only overwrite so much betrayal.

Dr. Blum died three years ago, and I never was able to repay my debt to her. I imagine she would encourage me to live well, the best repayment, or the best revenge, as she frequently assured me. I don’t know what she really meant by living “well.” I imagine it to mean living good. Doing good. It’s one of the only things that makes me feel much of anything at all.

And I assume Steve will be comforted by knowing how far I’ve come, how far away this feels for me most of the time, but his features contort.

“I’m so sorry,” he says.

"Why?”

“I didn’t even— I assumed you were… Who could survive that?”

“Nobody. Nobody except someone like you. And you didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

“I should have gone back anyway.” His fingers dig into the mass of his thighs. “I should have at least had the decency to try to find you. Even if you were—”

“The Russians got to me fast,” I state. “Turned me right over to Hydra. You wouldn’t have found anything, even if you tried.”

“But then I would have known. At least I would have known you were still out there.” His leg bounces, and he clutches the sides of his head like he’s trying to keep his skull from popping open.

What a load of useless information. What an exercise in futility, Steve and the guys combing through miles of snow, missing the trail of blood long covered, wondering, hoping, losing their real objective to the whims of fraternity. As if any of us wouldn’t have sacrificed ourselves at any moment for what we were doing, and gladly.

“And then what? Waste your time trying to track me down and forget about Schmidt? You did the right thing. The only sane thing. This is total fucking science fiction, Steve. You did the right thing.”

Steve’s hands slide to his face. He presses them there, speaks into them. “Then why doesn’t it feel like it?”

“Look.” I temper my tone, sifting the frustration out of it. “I know you’re gonna go around and around with this. But there’s nothing you could have done that would have made any difference. And I’m fine. I really am. It’s fine.”

His head shakes. “It’s _not_ fine.”

I do sigh here. I kind of want him to hear how exhausting this is, how ridiculous this whole exercise in self-recrimination is. Steve’s hands drop onto his lap. When he looks at me, stubbornness settles there.

“You say you’re okay, and I’m glad you are, really, but I gotta sit with this. What I did, what I didn’t do.”

“It’s pointless, you know.”

“It doesn’t matter. I screwed up, and I’ve gotta own that.”

And this is Steve, I suppose. He’s got to own everything, even the things that were never his.

“You would have come back for me,” he says quietly.

Of course I’ve thought of what I would do if our positions were reversed. If he was the one dangling off that whatever. I don’t know exactly; I can’t remember anything from that day. I had to rely on the report he filed which, for all the objectivity expected in an officer, was shockingly and obviously biased against its writer. I guess it’s the kind of thing that happens when you ceremonially promote someone into an officer slot with not one damn lick of real leadership training.

“Maybe I would have gone back for you. But who knows, maybe I would have done the same thing you did. Gone after that fucker, wiped him off the face of the Earth. Literally, I guess. Then I’d be the one getting thawed out by SHIELD.”

Steve’s mouth twists. He closes his eyes, brows gathering. “God, those pictures…”

“They’re awful. I know.”

“I can’t believe they’re just out there.”

I look to the rug between my feet. “Well, the hearings were public record. It’s the price I pay to walk around free, knowing that everyone knows.”

Certainly I’m glad not to be rotting away in some prison or gulag, but it’s a cost I don’t think I will ever be able to slough off.

“But look,” I say, “I have a good job. I _do_ a good job. The best I can do. I’m pretty respected. I have a life. Please don’t blame yourself too much. I honestly don’t know if I could have become what I am if I hadn’t been through all that stuff.”

“Of _course_ you would have become this.” Steve says it fiercely. “This is just who you are.”

Is it? Is there some sort of inevitability to a man’s life? Was I bound to be this, no matter what happened? I sometimes find pieces of another life I imagined for myself, maybe before the war. Or maybe it was with the 107th, those early days when I was still rooted in some sense of normalcy, a knowledge that normalcy still existed for me somewhere, maybe after the war was over. I think I imagined a far more sedate and mundane life for myself. Maybe I’d have a decent job, an honest job that I worked with my hands. Maybe I could buy a little house. Maybe I’d have a wife and kids and Sunday dinners with Becca and her family and my parents, a small patch of green I could mow, dishes in the sink that never seemed to stop piling up, a quiet, boring normalcy that I’d die old in, content with my small lot, wizened and proud.

I never had a single one of those things. I wonder what that Bucky Barnes would think.

“Just promise me one thing,” I say to Steve.

“Okay.”

“If you have a question about me, ask. Don’t scrounge around the internet. Please.”

Steve’s eyes meet mine, raw and earnest. “Will you be honest with me?”

I nod. Yes. With this, I will be honest. One goddamn thing at a time.

His head droops. “It’s just so awful. I’m sorry, it just is.”

“I know. But I’m really fine. You gotta remember that. Whatever happened, it’s… done. Nobody can change it. I’ve accepted it. I survived. I’m a strong person.”

There’s the barest hint of a smile on his mouth now. “I know you are.”

I slap my hands down on my bare knees. “Okay. Enough of this. You wanna watch something? You wanna talk? Listen to something?”

He shakes his head.

“You want me to just leave you to brood about this in the dark?”

“Yeah. Kinda.”

I stand. My own stench collides with me then, the sweat from my armpits, sweat from the exercise shorts of someone who has completely expended themselves. Not a sexy combination.

“Whatever you gotta do,” I say, suppressing the urge to stretch my arms overhead, to pull on the gathered tension and soreness in my muscles. “Just don’t go so far down the rabbit hole you can’t get back out.”

He makes a noncommittal sound. Then:

“I cooked.” Steve tilts his head toward the kitchen. “I made enough for you.”

I don’t know what to say, at first. I’m not sure how to slot together this act of kindness with what I just put him through, how those two things rest on the same plane. But they do.

“Thanks. That’s really nice.”

“Well, don’t thank me yet.” He smirks. “I never said it was good.”

I return the smile, fuller. Something like warmth percolates through my insides.

But before I do anything else, I shower. I moan from the relief of it, and in the mirror after, my shoulder still doesn’t look great, but wet scabs never look particularly inspiring. Tomorrow will tell.

We do watch something after all. I pull up old episodes of Seinfeld on a lark, seated on the other side of the couch from Steve as I nervously stuff myself with the only-slightly-too-charred chicken breast he made for dinner and some cauliflower I roasted yesterday. I play the “Yada Yada Yada” episode, hoping that maybe he might find the humor in it. You know, fell off a train, yada yada yada, now I work for SHIELD.

He doesn’t seem to appreciate the joke quite as much as I do.

—

“No.”

“What?”

“Absolutely not.”

“These are good.” Steve holds up the pants, as if getting those goddamn things any closer to me will make me change my mind.

“I’m not walking around with you in public if you wear those. Maybe not even in private.”

He holds them up to his own body, a remorseful look crossing his face. They’re wide enough to stick two full grown men in. High-waisted, some over-enthusiastic designer’s grab for a “retro” feel.

“Gimme that.”

I pry the hanger from his hands and re-rack them.

It’s been like this all day. Steve’s taste is irrepressibly terrible. This outing was not only promised, it’s actually necessary. My good clothes don’t fit him, and I think lounging around in sweats all day is doing something to his esteem. That’s one thing I can say about the first half of the twentieth century — nobody ever wanted to look like a schlub.

And I suppose this excursion is a bit for me, too. I need something to distract from yesterday’s disaster in friendshipping. I need some way to reset the balance between us.

I move to the wall of jeans and consider the fits as they sit on the mannequins. I pull a few different pairs and load them into his waiting arms.

“I wanna see how they fit. All of them.”

“Fine.”

I wait on a little settee right outside the dressing room, flipping through my work emails and sending a soothing update to Hill about Steve. _Nice weather today. I might go for a walk or something._

“Oh my God, I can’t,” I hear Steve say.

“Can’t what?”

“Come out looking like this.”

“Just get out here. Lemme see.”

There’s a small, pained sound, then the door cracks open.

And, okay, I see what he means. I laugh.

He… waddles out, I think that’s the right word for it, in a pair of skinny jeans so tight that he can barely bend his knees.

“Okay, no on those.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

He reaches between his legs and pulls on the denim. “How do you even sit in these?”

I shrug. “You do that. Just give a little tug, make a little room.”

“I’m not gonna _tug_ on myself every time I wanna sit down.” He says it in a low voice, even though the staff has been kindly diverting other customers to the dressing room on the opposite side of the store. “I’m sorry. I draw the line at tugging.”

The problem is in the thigh department, really. I mean, I have plenty of thigh and do fine in a slim cut, but Steve is another specimen entirely.

Still, it’s hilarious to watch him stiffly plié his legs in front of the mirror, as if doing it will cause them to loosen substantially. His face twists at what I imagine are his balls being crushed.

“Okay, okay, you made your point.” I stab my finger in the direction of his dressing room. “Gimme the rest of them, and I’ll spare you some more indignity.”

He waddles back, his poor ass flattened by the sheer tension. He deposits the rest of the pairs in my hand, and I fish out the straight and loose cuts and give them to him.

“Try these.”

He lets out a huff behind the closed door, followed by the sound of denim scruffing down his legs. I imagine him on one foot then the other, peeling them off.

He comes out in the loose cut. I tilt my head to one side, then the other, as he does a slow turn for me. They’re fine. But I want to do better than fine.

“I like these,” Steve says. He squats low and then launches himself up, airborne for a glorious second, before landing on the ground again. As if he’s going to be doing a lot of fighting in them.

“Yeah, they’re not bad. But let’s see the straight cut on you.”

Steve retreats, and I peer out onto the floor at a display of loud button-up shirts. I wonder how he looks in pastel. I wonder if he’d even give me the chance to make him try. I’m not sure he wouldn’t just burst out of all of them. I need to take him to my tailor. And he needs a suit. A good, crisp suit. It’s a must have for a 21st century Cap.

The door swings open.

Oh. Wow.

He saunters — actually does saunter — to the three-way mirror. You know it’s a good jean when they make you walk like that. They’re perfect, skimming him in the right places, showcasing his, uh, assets, long enough for a boot but without too many unsightly breaks.

“You’re getting those.” I look to his reflection to find him already looking back at me.

Steve checks all his angles. There might be a little vanity in him yet. “You sure they’re not too tight?”

“They’re perfect.”

The feeling of something finally going right is a strange and welcome one. Energized and hopeful, I drag him back onto the floor and load him up with dark washes and lighter ones, a pair that’s tastefully distressed and, for my own amusement, a black pair, just to see if he ever takes to them. I pile him up with shirts, casual ones, long-sleeved waffle tops, some good t-shirts, a few spring sweaters in cashmere. He’s thoroughly annoyed by the end of the second hour, petulant and antsy and probably hungry.

It’s a very good haul.

I throw the pile in front of the cashier, along with a couple shirts and a belt for myself. Steve stares slack-jawed at the register display as everything adds up.

“Okay, your total is $1,884.52,” the cashier tells me.

“Oh my God,” I hear Steve say under his breath.

I hand the lady my Amex Black.

“You can pay me back later,” I tell Steve, with absolutely zero intention of letting him do it.

“With what? My charm?”

“Money is coming.”

He makes a face. “For what?”

“They didn’t tell you you’re gonna get all your O-3 backpay? You should get at least a few hundred thousand.”

The look of puzzlement on his face is a little adorable, as if he can’t imagine that numbers even go that high, let alone that he’s going to get such a quantity in money. He ignores the cashier’s bids for his attention, the coy smiles that go unseen because he’s distracted by the paparazzo leaned against the hood of an SUV just outside. I recognize the guy, and he’s pretty decent. I’m surprised there’s only one, given that the news about Steve broke just two days ago.

I hand Steve’s bags to him. I want him to be seen participating in the world, being a real person. Celebrities — they’re just like us! The store will probably take at least a 5% bump in sales when the photos get out.

“You can do two things with photographers,” I told him before we left the apartment. “You either ignore them, which is fine because they get a nice side shot or whatever. Or you can smile. Whatever you do, don’t be a dick. And try to give your best angle.”

A perplexed look fell over him. “What’s my best angle?”

I honestly didn’t know what to say.

We open the door and the pap leaps forward, camera at the ready and clicking away. I think they like the passive shots better, so I tilt my chin up and try to look cool and not stunningly exhausted. Steve looks right into the camera and gives a constipated sort of smile.

The guy trails off after two blocks, as we approach the car. I appreciate the congeniality and low energy of the DC paparazzi. It’s another reason I don’t live in New York.

Steve tosses a look over his shoulder. “God, how do you get used to that?”

“It’s just part of being a public figure. You can either fight it or accept it. And fighting it doesn’t look great. That’s the doorway to the world, right there.”

For as obstinate and bitter as I can be about it, I want the public to like me. I want their forgiveness, their positive regard. I want to be remembered at least as someone who was not a total asshole.

“Did you get back pay?” Steve asks as he loads his bags into the car.

“Yeah. Plus, when you get classified as a POW, you also get 50% per diem for every day in captivity.” I grin at him. “Isn’t that funny? I basically got a living stipend for being in cryo.”

Steve slams the door harder than necessary. Maybe this is just one of those things he is never going to find amusing, no matter how many times I try to reframe it.

We climb into the front seats and buckle up. “And SHIELD pays me a fuckton of money for my particular services. You’ll get a fuckton, too. I mean, I assume you wanna work for us.”

He gazes out the window. I pull into traffic. I keep looking over at him, searching for signs of interest, consideration, excitement, anything. Where is the Steve I knew, the one who would leap at any chance to be of service to anyone, no matter how preposterous the premise?

“I don’t know what I’d do for SHIELD,” he says finally.

“Steve, they want you so badly they’re practically salivating. I think they’ll find something for you. We can get you a better uniform. Get your shield back. Get you trained up. Go after some bad guys.” I give a little smile, one I hope he will feel, even though he’s looking away. “Just like the good old days.”

“Well, you kinda took my job.” Steve finally turns to me then, and I find a heaviness there that I wasn’t expecting, the weight of lost opportunity.

“Oh, please.” My eyes roll. “Nobody wants me to be Captain America. They just put up with it because they have no other choice.”

He doesn’t ask any of the questions I’d most assuredly have. Why don’t they like you? How do you know they don’t want you? I wish he was more curious, because I’m almost giddy at the thought of telling him how controversial I am, how divisive, a reluctant compromise of desperation and a dire shortage of enhanced people. I feel urgently compelled to tell him how bad I am.

“And what would you do?” Steve asks.

“What I do anyway — crushing amounts of administrative work. I’ll do the boring stuff so you don’t have to.”

I don’t actually find it very boring at all. It’s the anchor that keeps me grounded and pulls me through my days. The thing that gives me purpose. My legacy, I suppose. One part of it, anyway. One small clean mark I can leave on the world.

“Lemme bring you in next week. I want you to check out the facilities.”

Finally, I get a glimmer of interest. God, I can’t wait to show him our training center. The cadets. I want to show him all of the policies I’ve written, the minutes from the meetings I preside over. I want him to see the most important thing in my life, as badly as I think I wanted him to see my newest girlfriend or the black and white Goodyear Welt oxfords I ordered from Sears after saving up for nearly four months. These are the moments I find myself wanting him most, just to see me, to tell me I’m doing all right. Maybe it’s pathetic, but I’m not above pathetic.

“Sounds good,” he says.

We get stuck in a snarl of Sunday tourist traffic. I rest my elbow on the door and lean my cheek into my hand. Steve takes in the slow-passing city through the tinted window, more sober than excited by the new world swelled around him. The people, the cell phones, the cars, the unique, dutiful vibration of the capital.

“Are you ever gonna call Peggy?” I ask. “I told her you’d call.”

There are a few beats of silence before he responds, quietly. “I wish you hadn’t.”

“Wait, why?”

Despite most obvious outward signs, I really am trying to navigate this right. It was always my intent to reconnect them as quickly as possible, to give Steve at least one more piece of solid ground to rest on as the future pummels him. I can’t think of a more reliable, more attractive foothold for him than Peggy Carter.

“How do you deal with all this?”

Ah. All right. I think I know where he’s at. I have a very clear memory of this part, and it’s not one that most would understand. It’s the intersection where the things that are supposed to be good collide with a solid wall of disorientation. Everyone expects you to be so grateful for the few things you haven’t lost that it makes the devastation easier to travel. But in this place, even the good parts feel like a burden, because the good parts aren’t what you remember them to be.

“It’s like drinking from a fire hose, I guess. And you’re not at all thirsty. Just more news you didn’t want. ‘Oh, that person’s dead? Cool. Oh, and them, too? Yeah, I didn’t wanna say goodbye anyway. Oh, and everyone who’s still alive is totally different now? Great. I was just thinking that I didn’t feel unsettled enough.’”

Steve gives me a vague hum. I can’t tell if it’s an agreement or a dismissal.

“That’s sarcasm, by the way,” I add. “Very popular these days. It’s a cheap and easy defense against actually feeling anything. It's really good for dealing with catastrophic personal and cultural loss.”

“Really? This is my first time hearing about it. What did you say it was called, again?”

“See? You’ll be fine.” I stifle an urge to touch him, to lay a hand on his lap, just for a second. Pat him like I did when we first saw each other again. I want him to find footing in me, at the very least. “And it’s not all bad. It’s a very convenient era.”

“Were your parents still alive?”

I shake my head. It’s automatic but still effortful. I tried to force myself through the motions of mourning for them. I visited their graves. I left some flowers. I reminded myself repeatedly that there was no more need for gifts on their birthdays, that I didn’t have to argue with my _mame_ about not dating a nice Jewish girl, that I could fuck anyone I wanted, and there was nobody left to care that I can’t even get anyone pregnant. But I never found any relief in any of it. I never could close the door on them, trapped in a purgatory of grief.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says softly.

“Whatever.” I shrug. “That’s what you say when you don’t want to talk about something.”

Steve doesn’t reply.

“But call Peggy,” I insist. “She thinks the world of you. It would mean a lot to her. You don’t have to talk long.”

He gives me a nod that feels genuine. “I will.”

—

Andre is actually a saint for fitting Steve in today. He’s usually booked at least four weeks out, but the prospect of touching the golden head of Steve Rogers was so alluring that I thought he was going to offer to pay _me_ to bring him in.

Steve is fidgety in the waiting area, wringing his hands between his knees as we sit on a very modern and pretty uncomfortable sofa. The place is bustling, loud with bubblegum pop remixes. Nobody looks at us much. The staff are well-trained, and the customers are just as interested in minding their own business as we are.

“Andre is the best, truly. I’ve been coming to him for years.”

Steve gives me a wary look, eyebrow slightly cocked.

“I promise he’ll give you a good cut.”

Steve snorts. I really hope I’m right.

When it’s time, Andre sweeps into the waiting area and comes at Steve hard and fast, a Category IV hurricane of infectious, effeminate enthusiasm. My _mame_ would have probably called him a _feygele_ , a word she sometimes used for Steve. I don’t think she meant it badly; there was always an air of affection to it. But I wonder now, as I never really wondered then, if she might have been right. I warned Steve in the car that Andre is overwhelmingly homosexual, that he flirts with anyone who is even remotely male, so don’t be offended. Steve only made one of his indiscernible sounds and went back to looking out the window. He’s very difficult to read sometimes. Was he always this hard for me to see? Did he always keep folds of himself close, never even letting his best friend gaze upon them? Are we even best friends anymore? I really don’t know.

Andre greets me with a kiss on the cheek and gives Steve an unguarded ogling. He fawns over him, takes him by his “big manly shoulders” and leads him to a chair stationed at the back of the salon. As I follow, I remember fondly my first time here, Andre squeezing my metal shoulder and murmuring, _Ooh, this is unexpectedly sexy_.

In the chair, Steve sits stiffly, warily eyeing Andre in the mirror as he runs his fingers through Steve’s hair. He takes it between his fingers and pulls it upward, assessing the length, brushes it to one side and then the other. I hear his whispered assessment: _oh honey, no, oh no._

“That bad, huh?” Steve says.

Andre lays his hands on Steve’s very manly shoulders. “It’s… vintage. But not in a good way.”

“See?” I gloat.

Steve glares at my reflection in the mirror. Andre’s eyes follow, and he gives me a cheerful look.

“Hi, handsome.”

“Hey.” I drag it out a little, give it a playful lilt.

“This is my best customer,” Andre says, bent over and stage-whispering into Steve’s ear. “Doesn’t he have just the most gorgeous face? I wanna cast him naked in bronze.”

I chuckle, and we both watch Steve wither a little, head ducking. I’m not sure what else to expect from a guy ridiculous enough to mistake fondue for some weird sex slang. I don’t know if he’s even had sex. He’s always been unusually shy about it, given how shamelessly close we were in virtually every other way. We used to talk about what it was like to do it, sometimes dead sober, sometimes silly and loose with a couple drinks in us. It began as early adolescent speculation, dim wonderings about what it felt like to touch a girl’s breast, how long you had to be together until you could do more. Later, it was me, spilling my guts about how great it was, how good it felt, and I seemed to be the only one who had any lived experience of it. Steve listened on, pensive and intermittently interested in the details. I was so eager to tell someone, and Steve was always my someone.

“I dunno, Andre, he’s not terribly ugly.”

Andre smiles, a luminous thing. “Oh, no. Not one bit.” He runs his hands through Steve’s hair again, but it’s self-indulgent now. “You are very gorgeous. I just like my men with a little more mileage on them.” He eyes me in the mirror and lifts his perfectly plucked eyebrows suggestively.

I throw my head back, laughing. “Mileage! That’s what we’re calling it? I thought they were called ‘wrinkles.’”

“Call it what you want, it’s definitely working for you.”

Have Andre and I fucked? No. But I’m not sure if he knows that I’d absolutely say yes if he just asked me. He’s seen me so vulnerable, saying things to him that I would never tell even my best friends; naked on all fours in the back room as he smears wax around my asshole. I’m still a little uncertain how much is his delightfully flirtatious persona and how much is genuine interest. He might actually think I’m as hot as an old potato sack. But still, he makes me feel like a million bucks, like I’m not a graying husk of a handsome man receding from a prime stolen long ago.

Andre stares intensely into the mirror at Steve. He’s consummately professional about this part, calculating his proportions, the shape of his face, the texture and thickness of his hair, the mathematics of artistry that only he can see.

“This is not working for you,” Andre says, “But I’ve got something in mind.”

Steve gives Andre a helpless look, then lands his eyes on me. “Just don’t make me look like that.”

Andre chuckles. “Oh, don’t you worry, you’d look terrible with that. I’m gonna take good care of you.”

“What are you thinking of doing?” I ask.

“None of your business. You can have a seat in the waiting area.” He gives me a wink but is simultaneously also entirely serious.

I feign outrage at the dismissal, and maybe it’s not entirely feigned. But he’s right. I need to trust him.

I thumb through GQ and Vogue and whatever magazines will keep me from obsessing. I do glance over from time to time, curious whether he’s using clippers or scissors. Like with all of his clients, Andre is deeply intimate with Steve, bending down for a furtive word, disarmingly open. You can tell the man anything; he’s a steel vault. It’s why I pay him so much, why everyone does. From here, Steve seems tacitly engaged with him, smiling now and again, sometimes brilliantly. Sometimes they look at me, one or the other, maybe smiling, maybe whispering. I’m just decent enough to try not to read their lips and instead focus on the tenderness of it, the ease of it. I’ve put Steve through so much lately, he deserves to have an honest conversation with someone objective. I wonder if he knows all the things he could say now, if his heart felt them.

I bury myself in a few articles on laser resurfacing and spring trends and the joys of traveling to Thailand. I’ve never been there. I’ve never been to many places as a free person. So much of the world is drawing away from me now, vanishing under a thick veil. Maybe I’ve lost my chance.

“Well?”

I startle. Before me stands Steve, tall and broad and— Jesus.

“God, Andre.”

He looks incredible. It’s a side part, shorter, textured, classic and enduring enough to be familiar, stylish enough to slap me straight across the face.

“I know,” Andre says, moving up behind Steve and getting one more handful of those shoulders. “Doesn’t he look amazing?”

“Yes. He does.” I look to Steve. “Do you like it?”

“I’ll get used to it, I guess.” This is delivered with a classic Steve Rogers deadpan. He likes it. He just doesn’t want me to know it.

_Fucking amazing,_ I mouth to Andre.

_I know!_ he mouths back.

I lead Steve over to a wall of retail merchandise. I scan the bottles and jars, waxes and pomades and creams. “You’re gonna need some product.”

“Can’t I just slather a little pig fat in it?”

I shake my head. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

At Andre’s recommendation, we leave with a paper bag of shampoo, conditioner, styling wax, and texturing spray. I tip Andre his entire hourly rate, and we say our farewells. Steve even lets Andre give him a peck on his manly, chiseled cheek.

We stop for dinner. Even though Steve didn’t have Ethiopian on his list, it’s probably just because he doesn’t know that it’s a particular cuisine at all, and an outrageously good one at that. I take him to my favorite place, a hole-in-the-wall joint that most of the tourists still haven’t landed upon en masse. It’s good, it always is. Steve likes everything that touches his palate. He marvels at the spices, the vegetables he’s never had, the yeasty tang of injera.

But there’s so much he has to learn, and the immensity of his ignorance is an unwelcome dining companion for me. He needs to know how to use Amazon. How to dress. How to use a credit card. How to blow dry his hair. How to deal with fans and foes in a way that won’t tarnish his reputation. With every objective identified, five more seem to emerge.

He needs to know. I need to teach him. And I need to do it fast.

—

I’d like to be able to say that nights got easier, that the dark got friendlier somehow, that Satie and Debussy and Glass and YoYo Ma were finally able to usher me into rest. But not even a full day of shopping has the weight to sink me low enough to invite sleep. I drift on the edge of it, frowning, trying to wrestle my wild breaths, equally wild thoughts tickling the corners of my mind, like how maybe I should just let everything out, blow open this whole charade, just let myself go insane again, just relax into it, become whatever it makes of me.

It’s silence, until it’s abruptly, curiously not. It’s steps on my stairs, heavy but conscientious. A dim shadow moves through the dark. It stops at the side of my bed. I’m only not panicking and reaching for the SIG Sauer stuffed under my mattress because I know Steve’s steps. I know the feeling of his body, the energy he radiates.

I sit up on my elbow. “What’s wrong?”

He doesn’t say anything. Instead, he lifts the edge of my comforter and crawls into my bed. I slide over, confused but compliant. He settles on his back. I think.

“How did you get free?”

“You didn’t read about that?”

There’s a small smacking sound, maybe lips parting and then halting. “I couldn’t get that far.”

I ease myself back onto the mattress, staring toward the same ceiling that I can only imagine above me. And I tell him.

I was on a mission in east Texas, some corporate loan job that wasn’t neatly situated within Hydra’s moral landscape but at least helped keep the lights on. The plan was simple and not particularly violent; sometimes they just needed someone who could be invisible, and I was as good at that as I was at the killing part. The last hurdle was an extremely high voltage fence that would be deactivated for a ten minute window, just as it was upon my entrance. But… I found out the hard way that it was not.

I woke up on the ground, groaning, my right hand throbbing with pain. Disoriented. My first thought — _Where the fuck am I?_ It didn’t strike me that the thought was wrong. The wrong words in the wrong voice. I didn’t recognize it as lucidity, because I acutely could not remember an absence of it. I struggled my way to my feet and stood, swaying, empty and silent as I looked all around me, the faint hum of electricity the only sound in a dark desert. It was eerie and peaceful, and I was both of those things, too.

And so I walked, stumbled, picked a direction from intuition and slogged one boot in front of the other, the man made droning growing fainter and fainter, taking in the world like a newborn with clear sight, the light crunch of dry earth beneath my steps, the skittering of small desert animals, the breathtaking wash of stars that gently spun as I craned my head above me, breath forming thin plumes in the cold of the night. It was unparalleled.

Until I heard a voice. Staticky. Status report.

Status report. And there was a darkening then, swift and terrifying, like a blanket tossed over the world, over my head. And I remembered.

They repeated the demand with growing agitation.

I responded. I didn’t make the words; they were made from me. _En route to exfil. ETA 20 minutes._

My body trudged ahead, but my mind was tumbling. No. No, no, no. Don’t. No. But still I moved until I reached a van, dark and emanating the sound of some game or another, I don’t even remember the season, the sport. But I was very good. Something deeper in me knew to be. Wait. Just wait.

When we got to the safe house, I was still very good, my body a steady shroud over my panic. One of them was just a stupid fucking kid. The other one was an older guy, probably only a few years from a real working man’s retirement. It was breathtakingly easy to kill them, as practiced as a reflex. They never saw it coming, even when I had my gun trained on their faces. They stood there like two stunned children, confused, barely enough wherewithal to even be afraid of me. It was that improbable.

I took their cash. Their weapons. Filled a bag full of gear. I threw the big guy’s coat over my uniform. And I ran. I bought a series of Greyhound tickets, ones that zig-zagged me through the south and then up. On one stop in Nashville, I walked to a library, maybe it’s just what lost time travelers do. I asked the librarian for information about Steve Rogers, Captain America, where he worked, where he lived, she was barely phased by my unkempt body, patient with me and my fumbling words, my twitchiness, I could have been a psychotic, an addict, but she was still kind, and I was not even the only homeless man in the place. She didn’t even have to look it up. She just knew. She knew I was crazy then, to ask if a dead man was still alive, she was gentle about it, _I’m sorry, sweetheart,_ I wonder how I must have looked to her then, to have her speak to me so tenderly, to look on me with such compassion. I somehow formed another question — where was Peggy Carter? She worked for the SSR. No, for SHIELD. She had a harder time with that one; people weren’t supposed to know exactly where Peggy was, but the librarian guessed New York, the Triskelion was still emerging, layer by slow layer, out of the Potomac River, and she walked me to the phone books and helped me look up the number, helped me find the address, wrote it down for me on a piece of small, rectangular paper in her beautiful, librarian’s handwriting. I don’t remember how we ended the conversation. I might have just walked away from her, maybe never said goodbye, never said thank you, how could I thank her for telling me Steve was dead, had been dead so long, that my ephemeral spells of knowing him, of missing him, were really me remembering a ghost.

I lost a lot of time, then. I don’t remember how I got from Nashville to New York, what cities we stopped over in. One of the only things I remember is waking up, head pressed against the window of the packed bus with the taste of salt on my lips and the seat next to me vacated. I imagine that whatever happened was both frightening and humiliating. At some point, my left arm went stiff at my side, locked into place from a timer to prevent just this, as if having only one arm could stop me from running. I think I knew, vaguely, that they would be looking for me, tracking through stolen vehicle reports, as if I would be that stupid.

I used my ghastly appearance to my advantage in New York, shuffled down the streets like a restless transient, my long hair concealing my profile, casing SHIELD HQ until I found her, day after day, starving, thirsty, saving my last money for the lucky cab I caught to follow her, it’s a surprise, I told the driver, an old friend, I didn’t lie a bit, and he stopped caring after I shoved an extra twenty his way. I knocked on her door much later that night, woke her from sleep, her sidearm pressed furtively against her thigh. But she was every bit Peggy then, poised in her shock, I didn’t expect her to pull me inside, for her to not make a face when she smelled me, when she sat me down at her table and poured us gin and tonics, she drank hers in one go, gave me glasses of water, a weak smile twitching her mouth, her hair white-streaked gray and loose at her shoulders, she fed me and then fed me more after it made me sick in her kitchen sink, when I wanted just the taste of it, the fleeting sense of fullness, and she debriefed me so carefully I didn’t know I was being debriefed. All I knew was her kindness, her calm incredulity, as she collected the fragments of my postwar life into a semblance of a narrative.

And then she took me to Howard.

“He couldn’t handle it at all,” I tell Steve, remembering his stricken, horrified face with a heaviness in my chest. “He fucked off to get drunk, I really don’t blame him. But he had this kid around, this sulking, moody little pissant, but he was a genius. He’s the one who fixed me up. We became friends. I guess we were a couple of weirdos who just clicked.”

“Tony, right?”

“Yeah. You should come with me next time I visit.”

“I’d like that.” Steve swallows. “So... what happened after that?”

When I told Peggy about SHIELD being compromised, a corpse of her beloved SSR bloated with rot, she was doubtful. She said haltingly that maybe I was mistaken, maybe my… circumstances convoluted my understanding. But I knew it. I clenched my teeth and growled my knowing at her, fingertips dragging against the varnished surface of the tabletop. She regarded me gravely, skeptically.

Until she found out for herself.

The Siberian base was a perfect target in every way, aside from being lodged deep in the USSR. Maybe I was selfish to hope that when she saw all the shit there, the cryo chambers, the chair, my training records, all the paper and electronic intel, that she would believe me. Her belief in the entire thing was so fragile, and I wanted her to be sure. More sure than I was. I wanted her to confirm to me that it was all real.

“But she and her team get there,” I continue, “and there wasn’t a single fucking thing in the whole place. Not a single goddamn mouse turd. Just an empty missile silo. So it was either that I was insane, that I imagined the whole thing up, or there was a mole. She fortunately believed the latter, even though I was also probably legally insane by that point. I couldn’t hold it together after that. Total fucking breakdown. But I got help, then started consulting for SHIELD, after they cleaned house, then moved to full time. The rest is history.”

I can almost hear Steve’s mind grinding. His hand twitches next to mine, so close that I could just spread my fingers and we would be touching.

“I’m surprised they didn’t try to get you back,” he says.

“Yeah, I bet they wanted to, but the Soviet Union was completely falling apart, and I think with SHIELD moving in on them, it was too destabilizing. Then after things started to calm down for them, I was totally turned. They weren’t gonna get me back. It took them way too long to get me where they wanted me, and all the guys who first made me were dead, anyway.”

“ _Made_ you.” Steve says it contemptuously. Defiantly.

“I don’t know what else to call it.”

I can barely make out Steve’s words, they’re that far below his breath. But I’m pretty sure he says “tortured you.”

The word hits hard. Wrong. How do I explain? How do I decrypt such a fucked up experience, tell it right, the way I felt it, the way I’ve made sense of it?

“I mean,” I begin slowly, “it wasn’t all torture. It really doesn’t take much to break someone. You don’t need to hit them, beat them, waterboard them, none of that. You just gotta throw them in the dark so long that they can’t even remember their own name. So you give them a new one. Then when they start to wonder if anything in their life was real, you say no, that was a cover. You did such a good job. You’re home now. We’re so glad to have you back. We’re gonna fix you. So they take away all your senses til you lose your fucking mind, then pull you out and coddle you and tell you who you really are, show you the paperwork to prove it, hell, you signed it, you knew this was part of the plan all along, and then they put you back in the hole to cleanse you, then pull you out again and feed you a real meal and smile at you, touch you, and you fucking weep from all that kindness, you know? You understand why they have to put you back in the dark, you gotta clear out all those wrong memories. And after a while, you just believe. And you know what? Machiavelli was so full of shit. Fear turns people into animals. But love makes someone a perfect servant, someone who loves his service so much he doesn’t even know he’s in hell.”

I clear the tightness out of my throat. “So, it wasn’t that bad.”

All I can hear is Steve’s breath, coming fast, hard, like he’s just finished a hundred meter dash.

And then he rolls over, toward me, and there’s a band of weight across my chest as he drapes his arm over me, sliding in close to my side. I feel the shape of his face as it presses into my flesh shoulder. He breathes there, hot even through the fabric of my t-shirt. I keep still. I don’t touch him back.

“You must have been so scared.” His voice is thick. “So alone.”

I don’t know why my face feels full. Why my chin gives a little twitch. I don’t know if anyone has ever put it quite like that. Quite as succinctly. I don’t know why it feels so raw when he does it.

I make a small sound. It’s the only response I have. It settles in the quiet. Blankets us both uncomfortably.

Then I feel Steve’s fingers curling just beneath my armpit. He pushes against the metal there. “Can you feel this?”

I smile. “Yeah. I can feel everything.”

His hand explores. Light, curious touches that skim along the plating and make me jerk; the press of his palm, warm and careful. He finds the bandaging and pauses there.

“What’s this?”

“I overdid it a bit yesterday. It’s fine.”

“Does it hurt?”

“A little.”

His fingertips lift and come back to rest on the metal. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

There’s something soothing about the way he drifts, a sensation of being pet, like a mother does to a sick child. I don’t find it offensive. I guess I don’t mind it when it’s like this. It doesn’t seem like pity.

“Did you still feel alone, even after you got out?”

The question is very specific in its wording, the delivery a little unsteady.

“No. I had Peggy and Tony. Gabe and Jim, for a while. People at work.” I want to say more, I scan through my years for the things resembling friendship, but I guess that’s the sum of my list.

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

He seems to consider it. How do you measure the magnitude of friendship when every single friend I’ve had since Hydra has felt like an unearned gift?

“But nobody else?” he presses. “No girlfriends or anything?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Busy with work.” I shrug in the dark. “I dunno. Some things just aren’t meant to be, I guess.”

It’s not that I never considered it. I spent nights in bed, just like this, alone, imagining what it would be like to have someone lying next to me. Someone who came to my place. Someone who I would have breakfast with in the morning, who I’d peck on the cheek on my way out the door for work, who I could call to tell about my day, who I would bicker with about silly things like which washing machine to buy next or which of her relatives to spend which holidays with, all these minor rituals of relationship I learned from TV shows. It was always a her, a failure of imagination on my part templated off of whatever I could fish out from my life before the war. But this kind of daydreaming always felt too abstract, too foreign, too impossible, no more grounded in reality than an actual dream. I never tried in earnest to make it anything more than that.

“That’s really sad.” It’s not a cheap condolence; his voice is rich with it.

“It’s fine. I’m okay with it.”

I am. I think I am. I’ve given myself permission to foreclose on that particular fantasy. It feels especially essential now, in this time of mortal contraction.

Steve shifts, his arm loosening its hold around me. “Sorry. I didn’t even ask.” He breathes out a weak sigh. “Sorry.”

He pulls away from me and rolls onto his back. The absence of him doesn’t make me feel better.

“It’s okay. You should probably go back, though.”

“Okay.”

He crawls out of my bed at half the speed he entered it. Or maybe it just seems that way to me. He feels like an entire tide drawing away from the shore, leaving behind only cold, wet sand.

I think he nearly makes it to the landing before I speak up again.

“Can I—”

He pauses. My request lodges in my throat. I shouldn’t. There’s a fleeting thought that I can’t, but somehow it still ekes out.

“Can I ask a favor?”

“Yeah, of course.”

My hands gather over my stomach, and I push the pad of my thumb across the smooth ridges of my left palm. “Do you mind if… I turn on a light or something? Just a small one.”

“Like right now?”

“Like all night.”

I can feel Steve turning toward me. “Do you usually have one on?”

“I dunno.” I spit it out quickly, my face heating. “It helps me sleep.”

The creaking of the floor gets louder, until it stops by the edge of the bed. There’s a click, and I squint against the flood of light that fills the space as Steve turns on my bedside lamp.

“I know it’s fucking stupid. But—”

“Is that why you’re not sleeping?”

Okay, so apparently I haven’t been quite pulling that one off. I can see the assembly of all the pieces in the look on Steve’s face, as his brow furrows deeper and deeper, his mouth slipping open, like this whole thing is exactly as absurd as it feels.

“Kind of,” I say.

“Why didn’t you tell me? I could sleep on the surface of the sun.”

“Because it’s embarrassing.”

“Bucky…” His head gives a weary shake. “I’ll turn on the light.”

“Just the one over the stove, maybe.”

Steve rests his hands on his hips in a stern, paternal sort of way. It suits him, actually. Being like this, so big, so powerful, used to feel like an artifice, one I could probably push my fingers through like paper mache. But this really is Steve Rogers, in quintessence.

“Don’t do this, okay? Don’t hide from me. You’re my friend. You don’t have to keep secrets. Especially not something important.”

My gaze slips away from his face. And I nod.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> feygele: Yiddish for "little bird" (literal); a slang for a man who is presumably gay


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

Over the next month, my life with Steve falls into a stable rhythm. I wanted to enter into a series of negotiations with him, after his fateful day out. I met and resisted the drive within myself to control every aspect of his experience, to titrate his acquisition of knowledge, to be there to contextualize every twist and kink in history. It’s a strange reversal to be the expert in time; usually I’m the one leaning into others to frame it all for me.

But I also remember what I said to him in the heat of my anger: he’s a free person. He can do whatever he wants. He can come and go as he pleases. He could walk out tomorrow and find an apartment to dress up like his own, in whatever neighborhood he chooses, put up whatever art he likes, fill it with his books. I tell myself that I’d be completely fine with that. Living with me now isn’t like living with me back in 1940. I know that. My proclivities are notable and numerous. My lights. My sounds. My very long days. My smell when I come home after fucking. My strict routines governing laundry day, dishwashing time, reading time. My obsessive tending of my orchids. He seems to like when I care for them, the way I slide their pots two inches into the sunlight or away from it, the way I measure their water and food to the drop, I’ve gotten to know them just that well. He watches me when I do it, from the couch or from the island, smiling.

I’m trying to lean into his autonomy. I encourage him to wander. To take the train. To visit the museums. To go out at night, talk with whomever he finds interesting. Maybe do more, if he wants. I’ve been pretty blunt about it, without actually insisting that he go out and try to get 21st-century-laid. I got him a laptop and showed him how to set up a Gmail account. I showed him how to order things on the internet and added him as a user on my credit card. I promised him I would never pry into what he buys. It’s not like I ever check my statement, anyway. It was sweet when he got his first package in his name containing an odd assortment of things — two Hershey bars, a safety razor and a tin of shaving soap, a single pair of argyle socks. He’s still fervently cheap. I thought he was going to stage an intervention when I cleaned out my fridge the first time in his presence. I chucked old food into the garbage, and he tried to save it all, digging through the trash, pulling out limp bunches of kale, browning half-heads of cabbage. _Couldn’t we just cook it now? This isn’t that wilted. These ten-day-old leftovers are perfectly good!_

It’s been nice having him around, though. He’s an easy house guest. We talk at night, sometimes about work, sometimes about things he read. Sometimes he’s angered by the course of history, especially the dubious morality of modern US military interventionism. Sometimes he’s almost breathless with excitement, like when he watched a YouTube video of the moon landing or saw the pictures of the Million Man March. He had a particularly hard day last week when he read about Queen, a trail that leads almost inevitably to AIDS. He told me the statistics. He listed off beloved gay men who were lost to it, men he never even got a chance to know. He told me about Koch and Reagan, the quilt, the ribbons. I nodded like I was hearing it for the first time. It seemed important to hear him, to let him speak without interruption, to listen to the places where his tone wavered, the performative throat clearing to cover up what was really going on for him.

That’s when I knew, when all those loose pieces finally clicked into place. All that strain was a secret working to his surface, pressing outward, contained only by the greatness of his restraint. It was so much more than just the devastation of so much loss; it was the devastation of losing people like him. He didn’t have to say it because he didn’t need to. And I didn’t have to ask. I have reclaimed significant skill in accurately reading him, at deciphering his unvoiced questions — could that have been me, would that have been me. Not this me, this disease-proof creature, but the old me.

And when I finally realized it, I wasn’t at all surprised. I only saw him in a new intensity of light I didn’t even know existed, pristine, whole. I felt myself tearing up at it, and I know he thought it was because of the tragedy of it all, and of course it was tragic. But it was actually the glimmer of seeing someone for the first time. Really knowing them. Taking them into yourself and holding them. I also lamented whatever it was in me that made him think he couldn’t tell me, the thing that forced him to carry all of this alone. I want to think that I wouldn’t have cared, that I would have hugged him and told him it was okay, that it didn’t change anything between us, that I still loved him. I did. I do. He is, without any doubt now, my very best friend.

It also reminded me of the pain of being on the other side of something so deeply kept. And I regretted every moment I didn’t tell him about Hydra. And maybe you’d think that it would force me into reckless honesty, a place where I could finally tell him about what’s happening to me now. But I’m just too weak to cross that bridge. I want to stay here, just like this, until I’m forced to step forward at gunpoint. The tenuous, restful peace we’ve found is too intoxicating.

But today, I find myself beginning to sober up. It’s like crawling out from underneath a weeks-long bender, the kind I wished I could throw myself into when I started knocking around in the real world again, when the goal of being a person felt so painfully far-fetched.

There’s a thick slam, Steve’s body hitting the matted floor. He pushes out a rough breath as Romanoff lays him on the ground for the fourth time in five minutes.

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter.

This is bad. It’s worse than I thought. I thought bringing him in to test him out would be satisfying, after all the hemming and hawing he did about it for so long. I figured he was holding onto some reliable power, innate skill, that would come bursting out of him when put to the test.

But instead, I got this.

Romanoff rises to her feet and offers Steve a hand to help him up. He gives her a shaky smile in response to her self-satisfied smirk. Yeah, it must feel damn good to be able to make Captain America look like a fucking fool.

Steve looks to me. His t-shirt is soaked through with sweat from a solid day of exertion. I already ran him through our fight simulator with his shield, a virtual training ground with pop-up foes and a series of urban obstacles — doorways and rooftops and stairwells. Within three minutes, the sensor on his chest lit up as a holographic target took him out. It wasn’t even a sniper shot. The guy was well within throwing range, his presence as obvious as a corner Starbucks. I started it over and put him through again, and somehow, it was even worse: shot in the head by a woman he failed to clock as a threat. Even more discouraging was the long, narrow room where I go to work my angles, replete with columns and copious flat surfaces to bank shield shots off of into stationary targets. It was abysmal. Even throwing straight was a challenge for him, more often clipping the dummy in the shoulder when he was aiming for the sternum, or whizzing his shield over the head of one he intended to smash in the face. When I brought him to the firing range, loaded him up with the most forgiving pistol and rifle we have in our arsenal, I had the surreal experience of wondering if I had misremembered the many times he used a gun on our missions, because he shot like he’d never even held one in his hands before. The only thing he can do well is punch the shit out of a bag, he’s got some admirable skill in it even, but it’s probably only because I taught him to do it so many years ago.

“Guess I could use some work, huh?” Steve says.

I stop moving long enough for Romanoff to make eye contact with me. She’s got one brow raised in question: what the hell am I supposed to do with this?

I scoff. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“I mean, I know I’m a little rusty, but—”

“This is a hell of a lot more than a little rust.”

His face falls.

“You move like shit. You throw like shit. You shoot like shit. You fight like shit. You have the grace of a fucking dump truck.” I shake my head. “God.”

Steve lifts his hands in a weak shrug and slaps them back onto his thighs. “All right. So you gonna help me out or just pace around and look disappointed?”

Where the hell would I even start? He needs everything, starting with a crash course in geometry and physics. He needs Muay Thai. Wrestling. Marksmanship training. Plyometrics. Capoeira. Krav maga. Knife work. He needs literally goddamn everything.

“I don’t even know what to do with you. Honestly. This is so bad.”

I’m crawling out of my skin. I need air. I need to get out of here. I need to _Stop the Insanity_.

“I need a break. I’ll be back.”

“ _Do whatever you want with him,”_ I say to Romanoff in Russian.

She lays her hands on her hips. “ _I don’t know if this is helping._ ”

“Then stop. I don’t care.”

But I do. That’s the problem. My stomach roils as I exit the training center. I can’t tell if it’s hunger or its opposite. I stop by the kiosk anyway and grab three turkey sandwiches and some waters, and I divert to the courtyard for a taste of the breeze only to find the air is still and humid. Not a single leaf on any of the young trees here moves. I crack open one of the bottles of water and pound half of it, and the coldness of it slips into me like a relief.

How could I have measured this so wrong? How could my gauge be that off? I remember him in fantastic streaks of motion, distantly envious of his strength, the force of him. But maybe that’s what he is. Maybe that’s all he is. Raw un-honed strength. Blunt crashing force.

I can’t find a scrap of my ingenuity. I don’t know how to puzzle my way out of this. I don’t know how to fit an ocean into a thimble. All I can find, all I can feel, are grains of time, slipping through my fingers.

When I get back, Romanoff is coming at Steve with a retractable dummy knife. He swipes her wrist away instead of catching her by the forearm, allowing her to pivot her motion and thrust it straight into his liver.

“And now you’re dead,” I say flatly. “Come get your food.”

—

“I don’t know what you expect from me.”

I push out a sigh through my nose and lead Steve through the door to my building. “I expect you to be better. You _have_ to be better.”

We’ve been fighting ever since we left HQ. After eating, I couldn’t handle any more of Steve bumbling around like a clobbering, lumbering mess. My obvious displeasure seems to have touched on some nerve, some sort of defensive reflex. I really should have remembered that he is, at his core, a stupid shit who never knows when to shut up, when to step back and accept his limitations. I can’t believe I forgot that this is the same man myopic enough, irrational enough, to think he would serve the war effort when he couldn’t even press his own body weight off the ground more than a couple times in a row. I never knew how to tell him what a disaster he would have been, that a good heart and gusto aren’t enough to topple the Third Reich, that his buddies would get themselves all killed trying to haul his weak ass over the Western Front before he finally bit it, too. It was too cruel, and I was too good of a friend to hold up that particularly damning mirror.

But I am not that kind of friend now.

“It was good enough back then,” Steve insists. “Got the job done, didn’t it?”

“Because you had a whole fucking team backing you up. But that’s not how the Cap gig works now. You’ve got to be an independent operator. Maybe you don’t get a team, maybe you do, but even then, they should never be picking up your slack like we were always picking up yours.”

His steps halt on the stairs behind me. I’m just pissed enough to keep going. Have a tantrum, see if I give a shit. This is reality. I don’t care if I have to throw him into a corner and scream it into his face to get him to internalize it.

Eventually, he follows and drifts through the door I leave open for him. He closes it and hits the locks.

“Well, you said your memory wasn’t great. Maybe you just don’t remember.”

I drop my keys in the bowl and turn slowly. “Oh, I remember plenty. How many times did I pick off some asshole who was about to blow a hole through your skull?”

Steve is silent.

“Or how many times did Gabe mow down someone who was _this close_ to putting you in the fucking dirt, because you couldn’t do shit with your shield except hold it in front of your chest like a moron?”

“I—”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. You’re lucky you came out of it alive. I really think it was sheer luck. And you’ve gotta do better than luck.”

“I did things,” Steve says, his shoulders tensing, his voice low and wavering. “I was good. I wasn’t nothing.”

And I guess I see what this really is. This is Steve, small, sick, helpless, aching to be seen, aching for a body to match his heart. Aching to be respected. I didn’t realize he was still so sore about it, that it was still this close to the surface. It wasn’t so long ago, I suppose.

But sympathy is a luxury now. He has to learn. He just has to. I’m terrified of what will happen if he doesn’t.

So I act casual, deny him the reply he undoubtedly wants from me. I step out of his line of sight. I can see the anger beginning to gather in him. It used to clench and shake his small body, but he ripples with it now with the smooth, flexing musculature of a slinking jungle cat. So I’m careful, my shoes quiet on the hardwood, extremely fast, extremely deadly, as I draw up behind him.

I hook the crook of my metal elbow around his neck and pull his right arm back. Hard. I pull until he chokes.

“I could crush your trachea right now. You’d be on the floor. Dead.”

I feel the rush of offensive energy collecting in him. It’s intense, tangible, awesome. He whips his head back and tries to knock it against mine, but I’ve moved in so close that he can’t make solid contact.

Steve shifts then, stepping back with one foot, getting his leg just behind mine, and he throws himself into me with full and incredible force. My balance fails and I fall, slamming against the floor, Steve’s entire weight dropping down on me. It knocks the wind out of me, and I have to keep my arm loose enough so I don’t crush his throat on accident.

He starts to squirm, writhing in my grip, but I seize the opportunity to wrap my legs tight around his, pinning them down.

“Dumb move,” I murmur in his ear. I flex my arm tighter. He claws at it futilely with his fingers.

He lets go with one hand, but I still don’t expect the force of his fist as he clocks me in the face. It stuns me for a second, I can’t believe he just punched me, and he drives an elbow hard into my side. I grunt and loosen my hold, deliberately. I could keep him this way for hours, endure a hundred punches and elbow jabs, but I also want to see what he will do next.

He twists around and mounts me, knees astride my torso, hands pressing down on my shoulders. His face is red from the strain of being choked and his lips are parted, drawing harsh breaths through them. The smell of his sweat — the old salty tang from his humiliating day, a new infusion of it now — overwhelms me. I pull it into me, hungry for it, stealing it like it’s oxygen. He doesn’t look exactly angry. He’s determined, his brow wrinkled, like he’s about to start spewing out questions. _Where is it? What are you planning?_ Whatever such bullshit we said back then.

He’s heavy. He’s very heavy. I’ve never felt him quite like this before. Never this substantial.

But it’s a ridiculously simple hold to beat. I thrust my hips up sharply, knocking him on the ass, knocking him off balance and forcing his hands off my shoulders and onto the floor on either side of my head. It’s too easy then to wriggle out and get an arm hooked around one of his, to destabilize him even more as I roll and heave him off of me.

I’m quick, reversing our positions, except I do it better, I do it right, hiking my knees up into his armpits, holding his arms down over his head. I give a smile that feels feral.

“Okay, now what?” I say.

Steve struggles, torso jerking as if he could wriggle himself out from under my entire weight. He’s mostly upper body, though, trying to flail in my iron-lock grip. This is the fucking problem. He thinks his fists are his only weapon.

“Can’t punch your way out of this one.”

His jaw clenches hard. He bears his teeth.

And then the fucker spits. In. My. Face.

Oh. Oh, okay. This is what we’re doing.

I tighten my hands around him, snarling. I feel the thick trail of his saliva gravitating down my cheek. He grits out a low sound, mouth twisting from the pain. I lower my head, just out of butting range, the muscles of his forearms shifting beneath my palms. I feel a twinge then, a twinge that shouldn’t be there, low in my gut, God, even lower, it’s a perverse sensation, one that makes me clutch him tighter, head dipping enough that I can feel his struggling breath on my face. Stupid. It’s stupid. This entire thing is utterly fucking stupid.

Steve learns, though. He learns fast. He kicks up his hips with enough force to wobble me. And it’s here that I’m reminded how tremendously fucking strong he is, how he can toss me off of him like a rag doll and send me skidding across the hardwood floor beside him.

He gives me a smug, victorious look and scrambles to his feet.

He runs, sprinting for the stairs to my loft. I’m liquid violence as I leap to my feet and give chase. He’s fast, but he’s not faster than me. I reach out my left hand and snag him by the ankle. I yank almost as hard as I can, plaster him to the stairs, wringing a rough yelp from him. I pull and drag him, his body _thump-thump-thumping_ down each stair. Then he drives his free foot into my chest, horse-kicking me. And I’m flying.

I crash onto the landing, flat on my back and groaning.

And then there’s a knock.

Steve freezes. I freeze.

It’s Morse code. Three firm strikes, pause, strike, tap, strike. OK? The question mark is silent.

I sneer, head lolling toward the door. “I’m _fine_ , Updesh. Leave me alone.”

Steve’s eyes meet mine and go wide. It’s us, fourteen again, drunk on the scantest swigs of my _mame’s_ Kiddush wine, contemplating our untimely deaths at her hands as she finds us wobbling around my room, laughing.

“Okay.” Veejay is probably fingering the gun in his pocket, imagining what it would be like to kick down this door, as if he could even manage it with those skinny legs, and put down whoever is trying to beat the shit out of me. “I just wanna make sure! Awfully noisy up here.”

“Okay,” I say, thoroughly irritated and not shy about him knowing it. “Go away now.”

We wait, stock-still, Steve on his back, elbows propping him up on my stairs; me doing the same but on the floor. We stay like that, our breaths coming heavy, tiny, conspiratorial smiles twitching the corners of our mouths, until Veejay’s footsteps recede down the hall, until he hits the stairs, slowly, and then closes his apartment door behind him.

And the second it does, I’m up, launching myself to my feet, running after Steve, who’s up and moving, leaping the stairs two at a time. I take them in threes, and when I reach my bedroom, he’s made some space for me, looming near my windows, dramatically dark, an enormous shadow in the sparse light that reaches from downstairs, fists tight at his sides.

We stare each other down, both of us primed for detonation, our shoulders heaving. My lungs feel a little too tight, almost too small to sustain me. But I feel another kind of sensation curling my insides, the kind of pressure that condenses and condenses until it erupts like a dying neutron star. I want to be that. I feel myself becoming that. From so many feet away, I think I feel Steve becoming that, too.

He lurches forward. It feels almost like slow motion, the predictability of him, how he bends low, charging like a bull. I shift my feet to brace myself, and one of his massive shoulders hits me square in the stomach, shoving a harsh gust of sound out of me. He wraps his arms around one of my legs, rookie fucking move, never grab just one.

I work my forearm against the side of his face and grab his other cheek with my hand, twisting. The body goes wherever you lead the head, and I stifle my own strength to ensure that I don’t snap his neck in two. His grip on my leg loosens, and I drive my knee hard into his gut and let him go.

He staggers back, clutching his arms over his stomach, coughing and sucking in urgent breaths. Shit. Maybe that was too much. Whatever this is, wherever the boundaries are, maybe I just crossed them. I approach him, worried, ready to drop everything, whatever the fuck this is, in an instant.

Steve’s body explodes into motion, faster than I can defend against. He throws a wild right hook into the side of my face.

I reel. No joke. Everything shifts and blurs and slides as my body flails against his sheer force. Jesus _Christ_. Nausea assails me, and I press my hand to my face, clutching my throbbing cheek.

“Shit,” Steve says, low and concerned. “Are you okay?”

I turn my back to him and scramble to pull my faculties together. I hear his footsteps on the creaking floorboards, coming toward me.

Well. Turnabout is fair play, as they say.

So I ham it up a little, letting out a sound that’s not entirely fabricated, nursing the ache with one cool, metal palm. He lays a soft hand on my shoulder, squeezes a little, and I move fast, closing in tight, my back to his chest. I yank him by the arm and pull as I bend over. It takes an orchestration of physics and every ounce of my strength to toss him over and flatten him on the rug. Romanoff would be proud.

I drop down and straddle him. I repeat the same move from earlier, pinning his arms hard onto the floor.

“Don’t even fucking _think_ about spitting in my face.”

His breath is coming closed-mouth and fast, his broad chest straining against the tight fabric of his t-shirt. I feel something then, a shift in him. A shift in his whole body.

He lifts his hips up, but slow, every inch carefully controlled. He presses himself against my ass and grinds against me. His mouth slips open. He wets his lips. My mind fades to white.

And then my body jolts as he drives up against me. I don’t even fight it as he lofts me off of him. I let myself be tossed, and not even very hard. He clambers to his feet and I to mine, and I throw myself into him, tackling him, landing us both face-down on the edge of the bed.

I pin his arms against the mattress and rub my hips against his ass. “Is this what you want?”

“Fuck you,” Steve says, but it’s weak. Breathless.

“No, fuck _you_ ,” I hiss. “That’s how this works.”

His arms strain in my grip, and I let him wriggle one hand free. It clamps down hard on my ass and gives a squeeze.

Jesus, whatever the fuck this is, I don’t even know— and I also do. I know exactly what this is. I’m already getting hard from it. I push down and let him feel it.

He makes a small sound, wet and half-smothered by my comforter, and he moves back against me.

God, okay. Okay. We’re doing this.

I growl and press myself up, letting him go. My hands move to the waistband of his exercise pants, and I pull them down along with his underwear. Steve lifts his hips for me and then grunts at the place I feel resistance, at what I realize is clothing catching on a stiff cock.

I apologize. He kicks off his own shoes, and I maneuver his pants over his dick and toss them behind me, then hook my fingers around the elastic of his socks and rip them off. Steve is already pretzeling his arms behind him to pull off his shirt. I catch it in my periphery as it sails past me.

I step back, turn on my bedside lamp, and start digging through my nightstand. The frame of my bed creaks as Steve climbs onto the mattress, and I start throwing out every sex-related thing that my fingers touch — wet wipes, a fistful of single lube packets, a half strip of condoms, all the things that I keep around for my myriad one-night fucks around the neighborhood.

He’s got his ass already in the air, resting on his forearms. He watches me, jaw shifting, his massive torso expanding and contracting with every labored breath. We’re not even fucking yet — God, we’re gonna _fuck —_ and he’s already panting.

My body stops then. I don’t mean it to, I don’t want it to, but I’m overcome by an addled helplessness. What the fuck do you do next? How do you fuck at all? How do you fuck your best friend, the guy who you just smeared across your floor, who just kicked you down the stairs, wild acts of foreplay that you didn’t even know was foreplay until it became this?

Fortunately, Steve gets me unstuck, reaching for the hem of my shirt, lifting it up. I take his cue and strip it off, and he huffs at what he sees, even though he’s already seen me in the— okay. So that day in the shower makes a bit more sense now. I feel my own straining cock as I push down my pants, the same UnderArmour joggers I just tore from Steve’s body. I toe off my shoes and step out of everything except my underwear. He brushes his fingers over my cock and lets out a satisfied sound when it twitches for him.

It is for him. My entire body is for him now.

He digs greedy fingers into the band of my underwear and pulls them down. I can confidently say he’s never seen me quite like this, never naked and this hard, and he takes me in his hand and gives me a pair of strokes, his mouth sliding open, eyes glazing over and landing on mine.

“Oh my God,” he murmurs.

Yeah. That.

I could stand here, I’d content myself gladly just letting him jerk me off, especially when he’s this hungry for it. But I’d be a fucking liar if I said I wasn’t already thinking about what it would feel like to slide into him, to hear him moan as I fucked him, to come inside him, God, if he’d let me, I think I’d do anything for it now.

He gives a sly grin as my cock jerks. “So, you gonna fuck me, or was that just a bunch of talk?”

I let out a huff of the mildest insult and pry him off of me. I mount the bed and walk on my knees to get behind him, settling between his spread calves.

Steve picks up one of the little lube packs and squishes it in his fingers. “Is this—”

I swipe it out of his hand and tear it open with my teeth. I entertain an image then, blisteringly sexy, of just slathering my cock up and shoving into him hard. But I’m not that kind of shit bag. So I coat my finger in a packet-and-a-half of lube and nudge it against his hole. He lifts his ass, and he’s spread so wide, it’s just right there, waiting. I push in to my first knuckle, and he’s already squirming against me.

“Wait, you’ve done this before, right?”

He scoffs. “Of course.”

And it’s not like Caleb bullshitting me into taking his virginity. I can tell Steve is trying not to be chiding, and shame on me. Of course he’s done this. Who wouldn’t want to push themselves into this man?

“Thank God,” I murmur.

Everything starts to feel feverish and surreal. Ripping open packet after packet of lube, smearing my fingers in it. I start to push in two, and Steve reaches back and grabs my wrist. He groans as he pushes them in, not very gently, and my eyes glaze over as he fucks himself with me, Jesus fucking Christ, I bend down and lick his back, tasting the salt on him, I can’t stop a primal, hungry sound from coming out of me, my cock is hard and probably smearing a wet trail over the back of his thigh.

He begs me. He shoves me deep inside him and begs. _Please, please, God, please._

“Lemme bareback you,” I say, kissing and licking up his spine as I wipe the lube from my fingers.

Steve glances over his shoulder at me, brows drawn. “Do what?”

“Do you want me to use a rubber?”

Steve lets out a weak laugh. “Why? You afraid you’re gonna knock me up?”

Definitely not.

And so I coat my cock in whatever is left of the lube and guide myself to rest against his hole. I take his ass in my hands, squeezing him, cursing under my breath.

He pushes himself back, slowly impaling himself on my cock. I let him do it, guiding him by the hips, squeezing into his flesh as his body consumes me. A shudder wracks through him, a contraction of muscle that clenches around me.

“Jesus,” I breathe.

I close my eyes in a failing effort to find this even a little less sexy than it is. I need to last, and I already feel an unsettling instability in my core, a tidal wave of an orgasm closing in fast. But even behind my eyelids, I can still see him, the long spread of his body, powerful, vulnerable, begging me now without words.

I just need to let go. I just need to let this happen. I need to stop. No, God, I need to move.

So I fuck him, sliding into a steady rhythm, not even very fast, hitting that sweet friction point where I feel all of him and he feels all of me. Steve shoves his arm under his own body and jerks himself, moaning into my pillows, shifting back to meet my thrusts. I tip my head to the ceiling, head shaking back and forth, a denial of this, how good it feels, even as I start to feel disembodied, like someone else is doing the fucking and I’m just along for the ride. Steve lets out a thick, almost pained sound, but his hand is still moving fast, and I repeat what I just did, bearing down on him, pressing my hands into his shoulders, shoving him into the bed as I fuck him. It’s raunchy, the room reeking of our bodies and the smell of ass fucking, and it’s fucking incredible. There’s a chain of sounds from Steve, climbing, and his free hand slams against my headboard as he cries out and goes still, his insides squeezing around me, and I lean into him, riding him hard, harder, my breath heaving loud and fast, I’m gonna come inside him, Jesus Christ, I’m going to bury myself in him and load him with it, and just that thought is enough to push me over the edge and I do just that, choking back a growl, shoving deep, my hips pressing forward with every jerk of my cock.

I hear something as my muscles go slack — Steve’s voice, whispered. _Oh my God, oh my God._ His hand is still. His body is limp, heavy and spent.

I gather the remaining reserve of my strength to right myself, to relieve him of my weight. I pull out of him then and grimace as I pass a wet wipe carefully over my cock. Normally I’d wait until I could better bear touch again, but it’s not the cleanest fuck in history, and I’m a gentleman about these things.

Steve drops down onto his back, his long legs extending out when he clears the place where I’m still kneeling. It’s a slow movement, one that makes him hiss a little. There’s a fading flush painted over his cheeks and down his neck. His mouth, those incredible lips of his, are parted, easing breaths through them. I have a fleeting thought about what it might be like to bend down now, to unfold myself and drape myself over him. To kiss him. To let him kiss me.

He looks to the comforter beside him, at the damp, milky splatter of come he left. “Oh. Sorry.”

I shrug. My gaze travels down his body, and I realize with a hint of wonder that this is the first time I’ve really let myself see his cock since he got big, he’s still half-hard and… well. I guess I really did get the knockoff serum.

“I know,” he says, catching me looking. “It’s ridiculous.”

He doesn’t sound like he’s being cute about it. He just sounds tired.

I make a weak gesture at my own cock. “Yeah, sorry, I forgot to ask them for the big dick upgrade.”

His lips tilt up in a lazy half-smile, too fucked out to even get melancholy about it. “Uh, it’s plenty big. Trust me.”

Good. I only want him to feel good, to do a good job, and I collapse on the bed beside him, just on the other side of the come stain.

We lie in silence. I think to say something, maybe another cock joke, but nothing comes to me. There’s only an empty expanse of space, a vacuum of the slightest unease, a feeling of coming unmoored. I’m at a loss for what to do, how to mend the widening gap, how to reach across the mere foot that separates us and pull him back to me. I can’t seem to find the volition to close it.

“I need a shower,” Steve says.

“Okay.”

For a few moments, he doesn’t move. I’m not sure what he’s waiting for, but he either finds what he was looking for or gives up trying and moves to the edge of my mattress.

And I want to reach for him, to lay my hand on his shoulder, to bring him back, to pull him against me, to bury my face in his hair and smell him.

But I don’t.

Instead, I watch him retreat, shameless in his nudity, and God, who could find any shame in him, he’s beautiful. He’s quite possibly the most beautiful man I’ve ever been inside of. I should have rolled him over and done him that way, so I could see what he looks like when he comes, so I could watch his chest hitch, so I could feel his hands on me. It’s strange to want a do-over of something so good.

The shower starts up, and I pull on my underwear and pants and get to work cleaning up. The comforter is destroyed, a Rorschach pattern of lube and fluid, splotched with his come and smeared with mine in the places where he rested and then dragged himself to the edge of the bed. I pick up the many emptied packets of lube and throw the unused condoms and wipes back into the drawer.

I look over the mess, and I should be busy pre-treating all of it so that it doesn’t stain, but I drift instead, and I can almost see him still, an ephemeral afterimage, the rippling muscles of his back, the expanded constellation of moles and freckles that feel as familiar as my own skin, marks I counted quietly to myself on the beach with him, ones I caught in brief flashes as we dressed and undressed as kids, as young men, as soldiers. I can still feel him on my fingers, the warmth of him as I touched his insides for the first time, the easy give of him, the permission, the trust, the places where there’s usually resistance but wasn’t, his body open and wanting. I could make a map of him, color in his sounds, sketch his glorious body, dab my fingers in paint and layer it as smooth as he feels in his deepest places. I could recreate him and keep him folded against me, take him with me until I become whatever I will become after this.

I sigh and tear the comforter off the bed. Fuck it. I didn’t buy a $900 washer for nothing. I schlep all the bedding downstairs and shove it into the machine with a generous dousing of OxiClean. Then I plant myself on the couch with my laptop, click around on Google for a while, and send a couple links to bringthedodgersback@gmail.com. I warned him against his first choice, steve.rogers19181, which wasn’t even his first choice at all because some fanboy already stole just the name and birth year. The one he finally chose is a good address for him. Very Steve.

The shower stops, and I trail the sounds of his movements as he tends to the self-care basics he’s committed to routine now — the roar of my hairdryer, the sliding open of the drawer for the night cream I foisted upon him with a stern warning about “mileage.” I pick up the barest hint of what I think could be a sigh and pause, the cold air of the fridge prickling my skin. I pass it off as a good thing, a sign of a job well fucked, and pull out a packet of raw chicken breasts and two heads of broccoli.

It’s only in reaching that I glance down and catch sight of my shoulder, the disappointing band of deep pink traveling in a pronounced line down my chest. God, I need to put on a shirt before he sees. If he hasn’t already. If he hasn’t already stored it in the place he keeps questions that he’s too nervous to ask. I really have been trying to take it easy lately, give myself time to fully heal, and I suppose the last thing I needed today was a good, hard fight-and-fuck. My first, it seems.

By the time Steve drifts out of the bathroom, I’m fully dressed with a pot of water nearing a boil on the stove. He makes a pit stop at the hamper in my closet, pausing to take in the bare mattress, fingers twitching at his sides. When he comes back downstairs, he falls heavily on the couch and takes out his laptop.

I eye him between knife strokes as I cut the broccoli into florets. All of his easy readability is gone, replaced by a perplexing neutrality. I’m not prepared for the taut wire of self-consciousness that pierces through my guts. Maybe he regrets it. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I’m misremembering how good it felt, how good it seemed to feel for him.

And then a laugh cracks out of him.

“So, what are you trying to say?” he asks.

Heat climbs into my face as I contemplate my post-coital stupidity. Never send emails just after fucking.

“You can ignore it.”

“No, no.” He sets his laptop on the coffee table. “I wanna hear it. What are you saying?”

Thankfully, he doesn’t sound offended. He sounds like Steve. He looks goddamn refreshingly just like Steve.

“I’m just— I just—” I stutter, and I let the knife clank down on the cutting board. I busy my hands gathering the broccoli and dumping it into a colander. “If you’re interested.”

“You saying my ass is dirty?”

“Everyone’s ass is dirty. It’s the nature of it.”

“And you think I need to wash it out.” His arms cross over his chest, but he’s still loose. Amused, even.

I, on the other hand, am flailing, channeling it by swirling around the retractable head of the sink faucet as I spray the broccoli down. “I just thought you might want to know the— common practices.”

“And you think I should…” He bends at the waist, leaning in close to his laptop, as if he actually needs to squint. “Trim my pubic hair and... wax my asshole?”

Oh, God. What the actual fuck was I thinking?

“Look,” I say, “just consider this more cultural education. Do whatever you want with the information.”

“And what culture is this, now?”

“Gay culture.”

This particular sigh is irrefutable and decidedly weary. “Ah.”

“And, you know, there’s a lot of gay stuff around here. Bars, clubs. You should check it out.”

“With or without you?”

“Well.” I tilt my head in a gesture of resignation. “You know how my nights usually go.”

“Yeah. I do.”

This is not where I wanted this conversation to land. This is not where I planned this entire day to land. I don’t even know how I’m standing here, soaking in a flood of dissolving endorphins, making dinner and talking about enemas and ass waxing with Steve Rogers. And I don’t know how Steve is sitting right there, his ass full of my come, arguing with him about how he could be a better gay. This is the peak of absurdity.

So I take the wheel and yank the car off the road. Or maybe back onto it. I don’t even know.

“I need to go to New York in a couple weeks. Wanna come? See Stark Tower in all its glory? Haunt around the old neighborhood?”

Steve pulls his computer back onto his lap and starts typing. “Sure,” he mutters.

“Okay. Good. Dinner will be ready in fifteen.”

He grunts. I throw some spaghetti into the boiling water and get to work searing the chicken. His mouth flattens and then twists at whatever he’s reading.

“Sorry about your face.”

He’s sincere. I touch my knuckle to the place he hit me. The place he spit on me. My lips tick into a smirk. A faint echo of it still hums in my groin.

“Well, can’t say you’re not good at punching stuff,” I say. “And you did good. Back then. You did.”

“I wanna learn more.” There’s a deep fervor in Steve’s voice, the raw desire of that smaller man I knew, kicking all the odds in the balls, beyond anyone’s imagination. “I _can_ learn more. You just have to teach me, and I’ll do it.”

“I know you can. I know you will.”

He will. He will be amazing. He will be the man he was always meant to be, so much more than this, and the world will never deserve him. And I’ll help him to get there. It’s really not the worst closing act.

“And if you ever do want to get your asshole waxed, I know a guy.”

Steve huffs and shakes his head. But he’s smiling.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader. 
> 
> Special thanks to licketysplit for the wise consultation on New York stuff! Hope I didn't fuck it up. 

Despite ample briefings, Steve is still 100% not prepared for the unique experience of meeting Tony Stark for the first time. Tony is almost entirely dismissive of him, greeting him with a weak ‘yeah, hi,’ as if Steve standing in front of him and breathing is not a sheer goddamn miracle. But I can’t begrudge Tony his baggage; he’s never begrudged me mine. It’s one of our unspoken agreements we keep as friends. I won’t give him shit now, even for this rudeness.

They alternate making furtive eye contact with me, Steve’s eyes wide, Tony’s eyes skeptical, like _this is the guy? This?!_

“How’s everything going with the reactor?” I ask.

“Um, aside from perfectly?” One of Tony’s brows arches, yes, how dare I even ask.

“Good. It’s a big deal.”

“Yeah, being a paragon of clean energy really is kind of a big deal.”

It’s Tony, pretending he doesn’t give one solid shit about Steve Rogers and yet painfully compelled to demonstrate his competency at every turn. He would never be this smug with just me. He’d tell me about the 90 second glitch they had last week, how he can’t find time to work on his Mach-whatever because he’s fielding so many requests from industry leaders who want the tech for themselves, how the Russians tried to hack into his mainframe just two weeks before that. If it were just me, Tony would never deliberately leave out his coolest gadgets on every flat surface of his new lab, on the off chance that Steve might find them interesting, so Tony could spew out a barrage of techno-jargon in a deliberate attempt to baffle him.

The door to Tony’s lab slides open, and there’s a clicking of heels as Pepper enters. She, on the other hand, is not at all shy about her enthusiasm when Steve turns to her from where he was examining Tony’s robotic assist arm.

She gives a brilliant smile. Tony’s eyes roll toward the ceiling.

Despite our friendship, sometimes I wonder how Tony managed to snag this woman, someone so warm, someone so socially competent and genuine. But she complements him sublimely. She is the oil that keeps him from rusting over, from cracking and crumbling into the dark places I’ve seen him go. I am so glad for him.

She takes one of Steve’s big hands in both of hers and presses it with her unbridled kindness. Steve seems a little uneasy at first, unsure of what to make of her. I let my smile guide him, she’s as real as they get, and his shoulders seem to broaden when she lays her hands on them for an appreciative moment.

“Okay,” Tony injects. He moves to Pepper’s side and gives Steve a hard clap on the bicep. “Yes, very strong.”

Pepper gives him a look that’s not quite withering, the edges smoothed over with the deep adoration she bears for him. She and Steve exchange a few words about how he’s finding New York, how he’s settling in, if I’ve been a good shepherd into the glitz and insanity of the modern era. He’s polite, stealthily eyeing components of her CEO ensemble — the tasteful diamond stud earrings Tony got her for her birthday, the immaculate fit of her dress, the height of her heels. I guess he is a pretty good gay after all.

“I would love to give you a tour of the building,” she says to Steve. “If you’re up for it.”

The only reason Tony doesn’t put the kibosh on it is because we have business. But he doesn’t contain the little sound of resistance that ekes out from the back of his throat.

I raise my eyebrows at Steve when he checks with me again. It’s another thing I told him to expect, but he still looks overwhelmed by it, by this odd and delightful cast of characters I choose to have in my life.

“I’d like that,” Steve manages.

She takes him by the arm, and Tony stalks off with a huff, shaking his head. “You better not elope, or I’ll be mildly offended.”

Pepper mutters an “Oh, God” under her breath and pulls Steve along. He tosses me a look over his shoulder that’s helpless and adorable.

The door closes behind them.

“Well, he sure is big,” Tony observes.

“Yeah. He is.” It seems to be one of the only things people can say about him. Wow, he sure is big. Wow, he sure is something.

“All right.” Tony gestures to the large, rubberized square of flooring next to his bench.

I stand on it.

“JARVIS, gimme a weight.”

“88.9 kilograms.”

“What was his last weight?”

“90.3 kilograms.”

Tony’s mouth flattens. He taps his finger on the edge of the bench, then dips down to pull something out of the fridge below. He tosses me a shaker bottle filled with some kind of yellowish sludge.

“Drink that.”

I pop open the lid and take a small, suspicious sip. It’s almost batter-thick, vile and chalky. I gag at the sensation of it slinking down my throat.

“Good?”

“This is fucking disgusting.” I’d spit on the floor if I had one less iota of restraint.

“Yeah, and it’s also a thousand calories. Drink it.”

I slam the bottle down hard on the bench. “I’m not drinking this shit.”

“Well, you gotta do something. This is getting ridiculous.”

I shrug. “It’s just— it is what it is, Tony.”

“No, it’s not,” he spits, all of his anger, his months of cumulative frustration, erupting to the surface. “This is a problem. And that’s a solution.” He nods to the bottle.

“It’s not a solution. It’s a bandaid. And a completely undrinkable one at that.”

His jaw yaws, and he bears his weight into the tabletop, hip canting out. He lets out a long sigh. “I heard back from Meyer yesterday. Caspase 12 is a no-go.”

I nod, my stomach clenching. It didn’t really shake me when caspases 1-10 failed. I suppose perhaps I was holding out some hope for lucky number 11, only to learn that this particular enzyme is only found in mice. Since Steve has come back, I’ve started banking a little harder than usual on 12.

“Well, there’s still two more,” I remind him.

He shakes his head. “Caspase 13 is only found in cows. So, there’s only 14 left.”

Okay. One more. One more chance to reverse this cascade of failure. One more shot. If there’s anyone who can make a long shot happen, it’s Tony. Hell, it’s me.

But still. It’s only one. I don’t think I’d slide even half of my chips in on those kind of odds.

“Okay?” Tony’s head jerks sharply to the side. “Really? Just ‘okay’?”

“What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh no, there’s only one more!'” I tilt my face to the ceiling and tip my hands toward the heavens, clawing at whatever injustice he seems to think is happening here.

He does not find this amusing.

“You know,” he says slowly, “I’d kind of like you to at least _pretend_ that you give a shit about your life.”

“I give a shit.”

“Really? Because I think you don’t. You waltz in here, Mr. ‘oh well, oh well.’ It’s not ‘oh well.’”

“Are you familiar with the serenity prayer?”

He snorts. He knows. He’s never pleased when I throw his brief stint in AA into his face.

“That one,” Tony points toward the door, to the place Steve and Pepper passed through. “That’s a possibility.”

My head shakes decisively. “Absolutely not. You’re not making him into some goddamn science experiment.”

“He already is one! Who cares?”

“ _I_ care.” I shove my index finger into the center of my chest. “He’s not your fucking lab rat.”

Tony’s arms heave up in an exaggerated shrug, as desperate as all of this decidedly is. “See, this is what I mean. I offer a solution, you tell me how it’s not gonna work. I think you have a death wish.”

“Of course I don’t wanna die. I have a lot of shit to do.”

For as many times as I remind myself, I can’t seem to set any path to wrapping my life up. There are too many dangling threads, too many projects that need me, too many people who need me. My trainees need to be taught. Steve needs to be taught. I need to push out at least three more policy letters, they’ve been sitting in my drafts folder, waiting for the gears of administration to turn just the right way. Who would take over my meetings? Who would be there to complain about satellite relays and recruitment strategies? I need to be there. I can’t shake the urgency of it.

“So help me out,” Tony says, deflating. “For God’s sake.”

“You’re not taking his blood. Not for this.”

“He might have it, too. This could happen to him. What then?”

God, it’s a low fucking blow. He knows just where to hit me, right where other people might hurt. And I’ve thought about it. The night after that single fuck we had, I lay in bed and was completely overtaken by it, paralyzed with fear for him. But if there’s anything that’s become abundantly clear from this whole dying process, it’s been my selfishness. I selfishly want things to be good for us. I want to indulge in our evening talks, our half-buried double entendres, our meals together, friendly and calm. I want to continue bathing myself in the light of his ignorance. I want to cling to my denial, just a little longer.

“Just not now,” I beg him, my voice a little too rough with it. “Please let this go. Just for a while.”

His hand curls into a fist, but there’s no dramatic slam, no hysterics. Just the voice of a man who wants to save the world, who wants to halt time, who wants to save me. Weary. Sad.

“I don’t know if you have a while. I just don’t know. I don’t. I don’t know how to fix this, and you’re tying my hands behind my back.”

“Tony. C’mon.”

“No,” he hisses, suddenly. “Don’t ‘Tony c’mon’ me. You can take that tone and shove it up your ass.”

I smile. I feel it all the way into the marrow of my bones.

“Don’t smile.”

I can’t help it. I feel such affection for this man. He will clamber to the edges of possibility, claw at it until he’s spent, just to help. To make good. To do good. I wish the world could see this person.

“You’re a good friend,” I murmur. “You know that?”

“Shut up. Just shut up.”

And so I do.

—

“Well, that was intense.”

Yes. That is exactly the correct word for it.

We stroll through the exit, doors parting silently to let us out onto the sidewalk. It’s a glorious day, mid-70s, the mildest breeze, a full sun shining down just on the other side of the towering buildings that line these streets.

“Do you wanna grab brunch?” I ask.

He repeats the word, wistful and curious.

“Breakfast and lunch.” I weave my fingers together.

It’s not like we never did things like that before, but it was a function of necessity, of scarcity, a lightyear from the indulgence that the meal has become.

“It’s a very gay thing to do,” I say.

He chuckles. “Why?”

“I dunno. It just is.”

Things on the gay front have been easier, since it was made abundantly clear that it’s what Steve is. He tested out the word for himself one day, when we were on an early morning run around the Mall. _I didn’t think being gay would ever be almost uncomplicated,_ he mused. I’ve certainly paved the way for him to be almost any kind of person. The world will hardly be concerned with a gay Captain America. They think they already have one, anyway, and at least this one doesn’t have a 40-year-long resume of aggressive actions against the United States.

But he keeps trying to test me, to figure me out, tossing me questions about how long I’ve fucked men, how many women I fuck for every guy, as if he could measure my sexuality in such crude proportions. I feel compelled to disrupt this process, to not commit in any way, even for him. I still fuck around a couple nights a week, the pool getting more diverse with the outflux of students. An NRA lobbyist who tried to get me to sign an NDA for _him_ , what a fucking joke; a newly single mom on the hunt for a rebound; a guy who was so new to America that we had to fuck in Vietnamese, the fractured bits of it I remember from my work with the Vietcong.

Our steps fall into the same rhythm, and Steve cranes his head up to the skyline. I’ll take him to Chelsea. I’ll let people think whatever they want about us. It’s fun to pretend sometimes. Sometimes I feel like even Steve is in on it, the way he sways into me, the way he brushes my elbow with his own, the way he never tries to make distance when a pap leaps out to get a shot.

And so I let Steve treat me, now that he’s got a fresh infusion of expedited backpay. We drink mimosas and watch the gays stroll by with their dogs. Steve throws out rough guesses using his new words — top, bottom, bottom, bottom, verse, top, reluctant bottom, bottom who thinks he’s a top, twink. It’s not quite right, he’s still playing around with his vocabulary, but it’s a game I enjoy. We throw down a bottle of Prosecco each, and I think I might be skimming along the edges of intoxication when the waiter loads our table with a spread of eggs, pancakes, meats, and vegetables. We eat until we’re clutching our hands over our stomachs, laughing painfully.

Our train to Brooklyn is blessed by a dog wearing a top hat. Steve grins, stooping to pet its ruddy coat, the owner either oblivious or deferential to the whims of Captain America. We get out a couple stops early so we can take in the old neighborhood, creep into its boundaries like a pair of invaders.

I really did think it would be fun. Back when I wandered in the ‘90s, I was awestruck by the changes, delighted by all of the newness.

But Steve frowns as we walk Vinegar Hill, streets that used to be almost frantic with activity, lively with industry, a cacophony of vendors and working men coming or going from shifts at the Con Edison plant. I catch Steve tilting his head sometimes, like he’s straining for those signs of life in the eerie quiet of progress. There are few signs of the old vibrancy now; the place is lazy and rich, and even I could barely afford to live where my parents once did on my father’s bookkeeping income.

I try to pull Steve from his melancholy by taking him to some fake-ass speakeasy that I forgot to look up the password for. The girl at the door sees who we are and says she can probably make an exception for us. When we get inside, I start laughing, because there’s hardly a goddamn person in here. The bartender and waiter abruptly halt some spirited discussion and track our meandering walk as we search for a private place, a quiet place.

Steve heaves out a sigh as we settle into a small, semicircular booth in the back. “Well, that didn’t feel great.”

“I’m sorry,” I say sincerely. “I didn’t know if I should warn you or what. You might have found it charming, I dunno.”

“I did not.”

“Sorry.”

Steve slaps his hands down on the tabletop. “Okay, I wanna get drunk. Do you know how?”

“Oh, shots. Ten shots.” I smile and begin pantomiming slamming them down. “Boom, boom, boom, you’ll get at least an hour or two.”

“ _Ten_?”

“Maybe 12 for you.”

“Let’s do it.”

The waiter has impeccable timing. I order us both 12 shots of tequila with salt and lime, and he says he has to check with the bartender to see if we’re allowed to be sold that much at once, just for the two of us.

“Bring your bartender over.” I gesture to her. “Have her come meet us.”

I watch him consult with her, pointing over toward our booth.

“Wow, I didn’t know it would take an act of congress just to get a couple drinks,” Steve mutters.

“Well, they just wanna make sure we’re not gonna keel over and die here.”

We don’t have to explain anything to the bartender. She recognizes both of us, demeanor warming, and says ‘welcome back, Captain Rogers.’ He gives a nod that’s just barely polite. She returns a few minutes later with a full bottle of tequila and towers of shot glasses balanced on a tray. There’s also a small white bowl of salt and a pile of lime wedges.

She sets the bottle on the table and lays out our shots in four lines of six. We watch her, exchanging giddy looks, as she fills each glass expertly. She assures Steve that he’s gonna like this one; I don’t drink it enough to be able to tell the good shit from the bad, so I take her word for it.

When she’s done pouring, she tilts the bottle toward Steve. “You want the last shot?”

Steve nods, and she tops off a couple of his glasses, draining the bottle.

“You gonna show him how to do it?” She’s asking me, a knowing smile edging the corner of her mouth.

“I guess so. Thanks.”

“Enjoy,” she says as she leaves us. “Lemme know if I need to call 911.”

Steve edges up close to the table. “Okay, so what’s the procedure?”

I form the side of my right hand into a fist and lick a line that terminates at my thumb. Then I sprinkle on the salt, lick it off of myself, toss down my first shot, and shove a wedge of lime in my mouth.

“Jesus,” he murmurs, his eyes wide.

I nod to him, grimacing from the sourness. “Gotta keep up. Let’s go.”

It’s not quite a race, but there’s still a solid air of competitiveness as we lick and toss and suck our way through our twelve shots. Somewhere around the middle, I glance to Steve as he’s dragging his tongue over his own hand. He catches me watching him and slows, the lids of his eyes going heavy, and my God, does he have any idea what he looks like? Not just now, but ever? How enticing his mouth is, how innately sexual he is when he only tries a little? Did I just never see this before because I wasn’t looking, or did he keep this side of himself carefully guarded? It takes only the smallest step of imagination to picture what he might look like if his empty fist had a cock in it, Christ, it could be anyone’s cock and I’d wanna watch. But it could be nice if it was mine.

I toss down the rest of my shots and give a satisfied sigh as I pull the last wedge of lime from my mouth and lay it on the discard pile. “Okay. Buckle up.”

Steve licks his lips and grins.

I start talking, blabbing, really, to foist my brain in any direction besides Steve’s mouth. I tell him about one of the trainees I met on last week’s trip upstate. He’s been _this close_ to washing out the entire time, a small guy, a time-traveled cousin of the Steve I remember so fondly, the kind of guy who makes you shake your head but also root for, a guy you want to pass but are also afraid of what will happen when you do. My words feel more disjointed with every sentence as I grow more intoxicated. I lose entire trains of thought. Steve laughs.

“Maybe he’s gay, too,” Steve says.

“Maybe. We’ve got plenty.”

Steve takes a responsible sip of the water the waiter brought in the middle of our shot-stravaganza. “You wanna know how I knew?”

“About what? Yourself?”

Steve nods.

I raise my eyebrows.

“Gary Cooper. _A Farewell to Arms_.”

I tilt my head back in recognition, dragging the blurring world with me. “Ohhh.”

“Oh, God, and there’s this one picture of him, he’s dressed like a cowboy, he’s leaning against this rock.” He bends his arm and holds his bicep perpendicular to the ground, hand loose, fingers just about to brush his own temple. “And he’s got his other hand like—” Steve presses himself back into the upholstery and starts to tuck his hand into the waistband of his jeans. He gets a thousand-yard stare, gazing out at the empty bar, very Hollywood. He could do this. He could be a model, an actor, any occupation that might capitalize his beauty. He makes Gary Cooper look like a ten-dollar Cary Grant knockoff.

“You like a rugged type?” I say absently.

“Not in particular.” Steve drops his pose and gives a shrug. “He’s just when I knew something wasn’t right.”

I make a dismissive sound. “Or maybe you like a man in uniform?”

And I feel a sudden warmth, Steve sliding in close, thigh and shoulder pressing against mine. “I do. I like a uniform.” His voice is a low rumble. “You still haven’t shown me yours.”

“Well, maybe next week. I’ll give you a fashion show.”

“I always thought you looked so good during the war.”

“Oh yeah?” I raise a brow. “Always?”

Steve nods. He leans closer. “How did _you_ know?”

I wish I had another drink for this one, not because it’s bad, but because it was so good, the kind of earth-shattering event that always feels like it deserves its own liquid salute. Like most gay things during the early ‘90s, it was bittersweet. It was me downtown, sitting on a bar stool, the guy young, handsome, earnest, just forward enough to pull something out of me but decent enough not to pull too hard. He introduced himself as John and bought me two drinks. His teeth were a little crooked, and he was perfect. He took me back to his place in The Village, and he told me he had it, that I could back out if I wanted, but I told him it didn’t matter. Back then, they were about 90% sure I couldn't get or give anything, not even a cold. And so I sucked a cock for the first time in my life, James Taylor in the background, and I couldn’t believe how hard it made me, how much I wanted it, how nice it felt when he returned the favor, it was hardly a favor, he made me feel so good. He was lovely, and I never saw him again. I wonder if he died. And I built myself on top of him. I wanted to be as beautiful as he was, as kind, as knowing, as sweet.

Steve’s head lolls, chin hovering over my shoulder, his breath warm and boozy against my face.

“That sounds nice,” he murmurs.

His hand is on my thigh, fingers edging between my legs. I spread them for him.

“It was.”

And he presses his hand over my groin. He massages me, and my mouth slides open as my already too-tight pants begin to feel almost unbearable and, simultaneously, very not.

“Are we going somewhere after this?” Steve whispers it, the feel of it in my ear cutting straight to the place he’s touching me.

“Mm… just the hotel.”

His hold on me tightens, cupping around my cock. “I wanna go now.”

I nod. “Yeah. Okay.”

I’m dimly aware of paying and calling a black car to take us back into Manhattan, to the hotel Tony recommended after feigning offense about us not staying with him. I chose a black car over a cab for the discretion of their drivers, and it turns out that my instincts — drunken as they were — were correct. Steve slumps against me and touches me all the way to Manhattan, murmuring and mouthing a dizzying barrage of charged comments — _I can’t wait to get there, I can’t wait to have this —_ until I’m thoroughly uncomfortable and wildly turned on. I press my hand to his to urge him, and my rapid-onset sobriety is the only thing that keeps me from unzipping myself and letting him do whatever he wants with me. I’m not even sure what he’d be bold enough to try. I know so little about this side of him, but God, I find my wanting to know almost painful. I squirm and clutch his thigh, paw clumsily at his own immense hard-on, pushing out raw huffs of strained breath, I can’t swallow them back, and I owe the driver a very generous tip for not saying a word, not looking back once.

I carry my bag in front of my crotch as we enter the building, art deco inspired in a way that’s a little chintzy, but it’s still an agreeable aesthetic. It gives me something else to focus on besides the grind of my zipper against my erection. The staff is attentive and indulgent, but the bellhops don’t quite seem to know what to do with us, because we only brought whatever changes of clothes we’ll need for another 24 hours.

I’m feeling substantially more sober by the time Steve and I make it to our room, and given the absence of the goofy smile that’s been glued to his face since the tequila started to hit, I’m guessing he’s right along with me. Well, it was a nice little ride while it lasted.

And so things are awkward as we settle in. His handsy interest, his filthy words, also seem like something maybe I just made up in my head. There’s nothing sexy about this feeling between us.

“I think I’m gonna take a shower.” Steve looks suddenly unwell, both too pale and too flushed.

“You okay?”

“I just feel a little sick.”

“Ah, yeah. I forgot to mention the hangover part.”

It doesn’t last terribly long, but it’s not at all pleasant. He gives me a weak nod and disappears into the bathroom. I hear water, all the water, and then the muffled sound of retching, followed by the flush of the toilet.

Poor Steve. I drink enough during the week that it’s unlikely to hit me that hard, but Steve probably hasn’t had an appreciable amount of booze in a year.

While he showers, I scope out the place, dismantling the phone, pulling the art off the walls, opening all the drawers and looking inside, unplugging the TV. My paranoia isn’t my finest trait, but it affords the smallest comfort as the post-drunk anxiety starts cracking through me.

I pull open the door and let some fresh air in the room. It’ll feel nice, when Steve finally crawls out of the bathroom. I stroll around the private garden I made sure was included in the suite. I do a few cursory checks there, not that there’s much to inspect, just the angles from the nearby rooftops, from the other windows in the hotel. An ambitious sniper could make quick work of us out here, but it’s a low probability event that I’ve learned to risk. I give a hum of approval, squinting against the setting sun. Maybe we’ll drink coffee out here tomorrow morning, read real newspapers, talk about the events of the day. It’s such a pedestrian fantasy, so close to what we might have done so long ago, indulging ourselves in each other’s basic presence.

The shower is still running when I make my way back inside. I give a little tap on the door.

“You alright in there?”

“Fine.”

He doesn’t sound fine, but at least he’s conscious. Maybe this is one place where my serum is better, more robust against toxins. It’s not that I imagine any of these things were carefully orchestrated. I always got the sense that they were accidental discoveries, vague theories at best that they were excited to see borne out.

I change into casual clothes and collapse on the bed I’ve decided to claim as mine. I spread myself out on it and touch my stomach and the contours of my face as I close my eyes against the weak spin of the room. I should have paid more attention today. I should have carved every moment into my memories — Steve’s disappointment, his drunken joy, the silly decor of the bar we will never visit again. Maybe I’ll never visit any of it again. Maybe this was my chance, and I was so busy curating the experience that I didn’t stop and let it sink in. It’s a new skill, thinking of some moment, some experience, as potentially your last. I need to get better at it. I don’t want to die in a blur. I shouldn’t even want to live in one, but it’s how I’ve done things so long that the reflex is highly overtrained.

The shower turns off, and I hear the hair dryer. I don’t know why it gives me such a thrill, Steve caring like this. The old Steve, the many memories of him that have re-assembled in my mind since his return, wouldn’t have spared the concern to groom on this level. Certainly not for me. We were always so easy around each other, never afraid of being dirty or unkempt, never concerned if we were wearing a shirt or pants that should have seen the wash weeks before. Roughness, a bit of dirt, a bit of smell, was assumed back then. So it’s special when Steve seems to be taking his modern luxuries seriously.

When he finally emerges, I sit up on my elbows. He’s got the same idea as I did, dressed in sweats and a t-shirt so tight that it doesn’t require an ounce of imagination to guess at just how big, just how muscular, he is. He looks less sickly, his face exhausted more than anything else.

I head to the bathroom and piss with the door not quite all the way closed. He’s left everything tidy, save for the toothpaste and toothbrush resting on the counter. It smells like hotel soap, something with lemongrass, very nice. I chug a few glasses of water and fill two of them to bring to Steve.

He’s half-reclined on the bed I clearly claimed for myself. But he looks peaceful, heavy, so I don’t contest it.

“Drink these,” I say.

He takes the glasses and sips them slowly, pausing to swallow and press his lips together, a sign of a stomach still teetering on the edge of revolt.

“Thanks.”

“Oh, you’re getting more. It’ll push you through.”

He yawns. “If I drink them, can we take a nap?”

_We._ I guess we are a we today, in waking and in sleep. But my own exhaustion is beginning to steep through me, and I don’t think I’d care what configuration we laid in, so long as we were going to be resting.

“Sure. So drink up.”

Steve tilts the glass to his lips.

—

When my eyes finally wedge open, it’s dark. But it’s Manhattan dark, the kind that glows perpetually, and so I’m not panicking as I come to.

My head shifts to the side, to the outline of the man lying next to me. It would have been so easy to take the other bed, and part of me argues that this is _my_ bed, as if it’s some sort of irrefutable universal fact. But he was there and I laid next to him, and neither of us bothered to argue about it.

There’s an easy rock, the smooth tide of his breath. He’s on his side, facing away from me, his outline broad and sloping in a fantastic angle toward his hips. I roll onto my same side, wondering what I look like from someone who’s lying behind me, if I cut this kind of awesome shape, if my proportions are all off now, thinning, wasting.

It’s nice to hear him breathe. It’s metronomic, as stable as the churning of hot metal in the core of the earth. My hand twitches at the sudden urge to touch him, to trace the strong, straight line of his spine, to brush my fingertips over the pronounced rises and dips of his muscles. He is at once so wonderfully familiar and also a stranger, one whom I’m only now just beginning to know.

And I want to know him. I want to know this entire human sleeping next to me. I want to learn and relearn him every way that I can. I think this is new. I think there was a limit to how I wanted to know him before, the kind of limit that just felt like decency. I never thought about knowing his body. Not like this. I didn’t think he would ever want that. I didn’t think I would ever want that.

But it’s a foolish desire, because this is not the time to be making acquisitions. Only an idiot would try to open new doors as his body disintegrates more with every passing day.

Being the fool I am, though, I strike a deal with myself. Let yourself have this, just until New York is over. Let yourself feel this warmth. Let yourself touch. Let yourself imagine the way things could be. Hell, I’ve already been doing it all day. I so rarely let myself have anything I want, not when it’s just for me. Things, yes, I take all the things I want, surround myself with my own self-indulgence, dress myself in it. But this is not that. This is not a cashmere sweater or an original Alma Thomas. This is one of those things that becomes you, that melds into your heart, and dies when you do.

So I reach out.

It’s curious at first, like the way he touched the metal fused into my body. I brush my fingers over the broadest part of him, trailing a path across and then down. His muscles tense as he rouses awake, his power flexing and shifting under the sheets, I’ve seen him lift pieces of collapsed buildings with this body, hoping maybe we’d find someone inside, and sometimes we did, sometimes they were even alive. I’ve seen him lift limp people with them, carrying full grown men he held as easily as children. They did mostly noble work, and I also saw them do violence, sometimes brutally. He always hated it, no matter how necessary or deserved. He always hated himself for it.

I flatten my palm and smooth it over him. He pulls in a deep breath, sturdy and expansive like the barrel chests of the horses we would find sometimes in the barns we commandeered, it was nice to pet them, to touch anything that wasn’t a human, some creature that couldn’t commit or even conceive of the daily horrors we met.

Steve makes a small, contented sound and presses back into my hand. I wonder how long it’s been since anyone has touched him like this.

“Feel any better?” I murmur.

“Mm-hmm.”

I smile. “Good.”

I give myself just a bit more, glide my hand down the slope of his flank, and rest my hand on his hip. I’ve held this hip, my cock buried inside of him. And maybe I would ask for it again, right now, if I hadn’t forbidden myself to bring anything with, if I hadn’t denied myself with a wiser mind than I have now. I think to that saner man as I pull my hand away, cradle it into my stomach, keep it held there. It’s too much. I’ve already let myself have too much.

Steve folds in on himself, legs bending, spine curving. He holds there, curled like he used to be when he was small, caving in on himself to scrap for even a little more warmth.

We spend a long time in stillness. Both of us wanting more. Both of us too scared to speak it.

—

I lower my head as a gaggle of young working professionals walk by me, I’ve been doing this for nearly two hours, casting forlorn glances down the sidewalks, checking my watch, banging out emails in the dying light of day, ducking and evading anyone who passes me by. My ass is starting to get sore from sitting on the low brick wall bordering the property. I’m frankly surprised nobody has called the police regarding a squirrelly fellow who most certainly looks like he’s up to no good.

And I guess I am up to no good. It’s been a rough few days since New York. My gimbals are all off, like I’m still hung over. Nothing feels right now. Nothing feels stable. I suppose I did this to myself; my decision to invite Steve was utterly divorced from sanity, impaired by the nostalgia that’s been rotting my brain ever since he came back into the world. Not even work soothes me. Not even the tedium can ground me. I don’t know what the fuck is exactly going on, but I don’t like it.

“Did you forget something?”

My head whips toward the sound of the voice. There stands Lindsay, dressed in an ensemble of workout tights and a light hoodie. Her hair is pulled back in a neat ponytail that allows for the full showcasing of her face, made up only with mascara, her mouth twisted into a smirk.

I shake my head.

Her eyebrows rise.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d still be in town,” I say.

“I’m on internship at the Economic Policy Institute.”

“Oh, congrats.”

“Thanks.”

She falls silent again. Yeah, she’s gonna make me ask for it, isn’t she?

“Just wanted to see if you were busy.”

“You mean you wanted to see if I was up for a booty call.”

I cough out a weak laugh. “I guess.”

“Well, I need to, ah, freshen up.” She looks up to what must be her bedroom window. “But you can come in, if you want.”

When she leads me upstairs, it feels like an entirely different building, an entirely different person I’m following. I don’t think I’ve ever cold-called for a fuck before, but I’m fully realizing the contribution of the pre-game flirtation and banter to the sexiness of this kind of thing.

She offers me a seat on the couch while she ‘freshens up,’ loading me with a tumbler full of whiskey and coke. She chugged hers standing at the counter, and is this a necessary ingredient, too? Is this what it takes to fuck? To fuck me?

I sit stiff-backed, eyes flitting around the surfaces of her apartment. There are dishes on the counter next to her sink and a pile of them sitting on the drying rack, a fat stack of mail on the edge of the counter, five pairs of shoes — not including mine — kicked off haphazardly in front of the door. It’s untidy but not dirty, well-lived-in, not like mine, which used to look show-ready at almost all times before Steve became my roommate. It’s becoming his own in so many ways, steadily populating with a nascent collection of possessions that he’s slotted right into my own. This could be me now, sitting on the couch, him in the shower, pretending it’s a worn routine when, really, I can’t wait for him to come out smelling like the bar of soap he bought, hand-made and fragrant with sage and cypress, maybe one of the only indulgences he’s allowed for himself. And maybe he’ll sit down next to me on the couch, we could just be reading together, bullshitting, debating, doing nothing— and I would feel content. With him, it doesn’t take very much.

I gulp down my drink when I hear the shower stop. I did come here for something. I came because I needed something easy, something uncomplicated, to snap me back, something a little familiar but not too familiar. And I need to start getting myself in the mood, or this might be a disaster in the making.

Fortunately, she comes out looking nice, smelling nice, smiling, wearing a matching camisole and underwear set that she owns entirely. She stands at the doorway to her room and tilts her head to beckon me and, okay. This is why I came here.

She doesn’t let me be awkward for very long. We kiss and she talks dirty, did I miss her pussy, did I miss the tits she lifts my hands to grab, and she’s good at this, confident but not arrogant, not corny or rehearsed, and I begin to relax and let myself play along as she tells me all the things I’m going to do for her, and yes, _yes_ , I say, I’ll do anything. In bed, she guides me onto my back and kneels over my face, and I guess I do a pretty good job, because she lets me fuck her in the ass after.

Later, we lie side by side on her bed, because we’re both too fucked out to do or say much of anything, and it would be extremely dick of me to just leave. In the silence, my thoughts drift to the last person I shared a bed with, the sound of Steve stirring the covers as he began to wake up, I was already awake, watching the room as it began to glow with early morning light. And— I touched him again. I touched his back, even though I knew it was wrong, I needed it, I was restless with it, like a breath held too long, and I ghosted my fingers over the soft cotton of his shirt and he shuddered. I slid in close to him, pressed my chest to him and buried my face in his hair. He smelled like sleep, he smelled like Steve, that never changed about him. And I rocked my hips against him slowly, he sighed and shifted back against me until I was hard, and he said _I want you_ , I could feel his words in my chest, the ache in them, _Bucky, I want you._ I hated telling him that I didn’t have anything, but I had my hand, I trailed it down his stomach and then palmed him over his underwear, his cock twitched and strained against me, I reached inside, I had to touch him, feel the velvety skin of him slide in my grip as he let out startled little gasps and said _Yes_ , he writhed and whimpered and clutched my leg as I jerked him, as I ground my cock against him, moving like I was fucking him, Jesus Christ how I wanted to, and he came with an open-mouthed moan he muffled into the meat of his bicep and— I only wanted to hold him then, I wanted to tear off our clothes and pull him into me, let his body consume me to ash, but my hand was full of his warm come, and I didn’t know what to do with it. And I guess that was fine, because he turned around, pushed me onto my back, threw down the bedding, and he touched me, he kissed my flinching stomach and he sucked me off. It hardly took anything and I was gone. Just gone.

“I never thought you’d be so quiet,” Lindsay says with a smile in her voice.

I roll my head to the side. “What do you mean?”

She gives a small shrug. “You hardly make any noise at all, and when you come, you kinda look like you’re having an aneurysm, but you really don’t want anyone to know.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen myself come, but I certainly never envisioned it like that. “Huh.”

“I don’t mean it as an insult.” She brushes her fingers over my forearm. “I just don’t know how you do it. I think it’s kind of impressive.”

I really doubt that’s the word for it.

“So, my o-face is not great, is what you’re saying.”

“You just look uncomfortable. Sex is the one time you get to moan and writhe and do crazy things with your body and it’s totally okay. It’s just kind of…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, and I don’t want her to, because I’m pretty sure she’s going to say ‘sad.’

My gaze drifts back to her ceiling, my flesh hand pressing against the uneasy sensation in my stomach. I suppose this is another unwanted gift from Hydra, the ability to be quiet, the imperative to be quiet. Not just to be quiet, but to _be_ quiet. After I screamed myself out that first year or two, they taught me to be ether, nothing more substantive than a flicker out of the corner of an eye. I learned to stifle pain, subdue my rage, take any pleasure in the greatest and most silent of secrecy. It’s etched into my DNA, I suppose, as reflexive as a flinch.

I just can’t believe nobody said anything before.

Lindsay is still grazing her fingers over my arm, the lightness, the tenderness, is new for her. “Did I upset you?”

“Not really.” I feel my mouth flatten. “Sorry if I’m a bad lay.”

She rolls toward me, onto her side, leg brushing over mine. She looks me in the eye and presses her hand over my chest. “If you were a bad lay, I wouldn’t have invited you up.”

I give her wrist a pat. “I should go.”

There’s a beat where she doesn’t move, searching my face, curious and something else I have difficulty translating, something fleeting and then corralled. “Okay.”

I slide off the bed and put on my clothes as I find them. Lindsay watches me, cheek propped on her upturned hand, it’s almost a mirror of how things were the first time we were together.

“How’s your friend adjusting?” she asks.

“Fine.”

“Do you talk much?”

“He lives with me.”

“Oh.”

Okay, so I wasn’t planning for that particular disclosure, or any disclosure, for that matter. I’m not concerned about her discretion, and it’s not like the paparazzi couldn’t figure it out if they tried a little harder. What are they gonna say? Steve and I live together? We do. That we fuck? We have.

I pull on my jeans and shirt, and they both slide on easily, maybe too easily. As I feel around my pockets for my wallet and keys and phone, I wonder if she’s noticed, if I’m beginning to look like a different person from one week to the next.

I pause at the door, hand resting on the door frame. “Thanks.”

Lindsay chuckles. “For what?”

“My life is complicated right now. This was… pretty uncomplicated.”

“I’m not a very complicated person.”

“I don’t know if that’s true.”

“Well, I hope your life gets less complicated.” She doesn’t owe me the sincerity in her voice, but she gives it anyway.

“We’ll see.”

“If you ever want to hang out again, you know where to find me.”

“Yeah. I do.”

With each stair descended, I feel the weight of finality grow heavier. I don’t think I’ll be coming back here. And maybe such a thought might have once struck me as a relief, but tonight it drops hard into my gut and takes root there. The walk home does little to assuage a strange and dawning sense of dread — about what, I can’t even say. It’s a planet that’s been cleaved out of its orbit, dark and mysterious, massive and silent.

When I crack open the door to my apartment, Steve isn’t occupying his usual place on the couch. I’m greeted instead with the sound of grunting and crane my head to see him monkeying his way up and down the rail that borders my loft, it’s a wonder that the whole thing doesn’t collapse under his mass.

I shut and lock the door, and as I’m stooped to untie my shoes, there’s a resonant _thud_ as he drops hard onto the floor. He says nothing to me as he pads to the kitchen, where he parks himself at the back counter and takes a few deep gulps from a plastic bottle containing some kind of smoothie. It’s light brown, probably the chocolate peanut butter banana concoction I showed him how to make in the Vitamix a couple weeks ago. He made an obscene sound when he took his first sip and has been drinking it like water ever since.

“How was your day?” I ask.

“Fine.” He delivers this flatly, back turned to me.

This isn’t entirely unusual, even if it doesn’t feel good. Steve has always been prone to fits of brooding, long stretches of contemplative or indignant silence I usually don’t know the content of until days after it’s passed, usually after a campaign of aggressive nagging.

I lean my hip into the side of the island, arms crossing over my chest. “What’s wrong?”

“Did you have fun tonight?” He slams the bottle down hard.

My brows tighten. “Why do you think I was having fun?”

“You think I can’t smell it?” he mutters.

I take a deep breath and I smell too, I smell his deodorant and everything it can’t quite cover, I smell sweetness coming from the unwashed blender in the sink, I smell Updesh’s cooking wafting up through the air ducts. I smell myself. I smell like I’ve been doing exactly what I’ve been doing. It’s still smeared on my face.

“Yeah, I go out,” I say, forcing nonchalance into my voice. “What’s the problem? I thought you knew.”

His shoulders tense as he braces himself against the counter. “I’m here, you know. I’m here all the time.”

“I know.”

“So, what is it?” Steve turns around and gestures down his body. “This doesn’t appeal to you?”

“Of course it does.”

“Then why won’t you— fuck me? You can come home, and you can have me.”

It’s such a simple notion, coming home from work, sun maybe even still in the sky, Steve there to greet me, we could fuck for a while, take our time, have a nice evening together.

“I mean, of course I want to.”

Steve’s hands drift to his sides as he steps forward, at once both a wall of immense force and just as small as he was when I left him in 1943. “Then why don’t you? Why don’t you touch me? Why don’t you ever kiss me?”

“Look, stuff happened.” It’s flimsy. I know it. “This just has to be easy, uncomplicated, no expectations. If something happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it’s fine.”

He stops just shy of me. Either of us could lift an arm and brush the other with our fingertips. “It’s not fine.”

“What?”

“I want you.”

His words take a while to land. It’s not just ‘I want you.’ It’s ‘I _want_ you.’ And I’m shaking my head because… no.

“Okay, I just wanna clarify something.” I point my finger between us. “You and I are friends. And we happen to fuck sometimes. That’s it. End of story.”

“Why? Why is that the end of the story?”

“Because! Do you really think we’re gonna be boyfriends or some shit?”

I scoff and step away, my hands on my hips. I have to. I can’t be this close to him. When I whip back around from a safer distance, Steve is still there, wounded.

“This is not a romance. I don’t have room in my life for that. So if that’s what you want, you’re barking up the wrong tree. We’re either friends who fuck, or we’re friends who don’t fuck. I couldn’t care less which one. But those are the only two choices.”

That feeling is back, the one from Lindsay’s bed, a lurching sickness that sharpens as Steve walks to the living room.

“Maybe I should get my own place,” he says.

“Yes, that’s the solution to the problem, run away from home. Jesus, you’re such a kid.”

He stops mid-stride, like a car slamming full-speed into a brick wall. “I am not a kid.”

Steve’s words are quiet but powerful enough to shake bedrock. Of course. I know what he’s seen. I know what he’s done. Nobody comes back from a war like that still a child.

So I soften myself.

“I know, but you’re young. The world is black and white to you. But that’s not actually the world. It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

There’s a snort, weak and a little defeated. “Says the guy who gives me two choices. You’re a hypocrite.”

I don’t argue. God knows I am. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

Steve doesn’t reply. He doesn’t look at me as I walk by. He wanders to the window and stares sourly out of it as I climb upstairs to grab some clothes.

Over the sound of the shower, I hear the loud clang of something slamming into the sink. I sigh and scrub my soapy hands through my scruff. It’s harder to scrub off this day, the erratic flights of untenable fantasy that try to lay root in me still.

When I come out, Steve is on his laptop.

“Don’t tell me you’re looking for apartments.”

“I’m not.”

I let out a long breath as I make my way back to the kitchen. “I like having you here. But it just has to be simple. I’m sorry.”

His eyes stay locked on his screen. “It’s fine. I can handle it. I’m an adult.”

I putter around for a few minutes, filling up the blender with water to get the dried gunk soaking, passing a paper towel around the rim of the sink. “Want some dinner?”

Steve shakes his head. “I’m full.”

And so I make dinner for one.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

Life over the next five weeks ossifies into a stagnant kind of peace. We wake up, I work, I come home, we eat together, maybe watch some TV, go to bed. Light on, music gently filling the open space. Increasingly, though not with firm regularity, Steve comes into the office with me, where he expends hours training with Romanoff or Perez or even Barton, who I would never ask for anything unless direness necessitated it. But this situation is a dire one, and I will tap any source by hook or crook if it means getting Steve trained up.

By all appearances, things are going well. But there’s something that’s parted us, like we’re living on opposite sides of a pane of glass. I can see him, I can hear him, but there are places I can’t reach, places I just so recently discovered that have become obscured. We’ve been here before, in the grim months after Kreischberg, and I was certain that our distance couldn’t be bridged. How do you build a bridge from a real person to whatever I had become?

But there was an inevitability to us then, to our friendship. I couldn’t say how we fully reconstructed the link between us, so I can’t duplicate the process now. I want to. And I also know, with great chagrin, that things might be for the best just the way they are.

Right now I’m taking a break, skulking around in the corner of one of the small training rooms, watching Steve run Kali drills with Romanoff. It’s debatable how useful this particular skill set will be for him; I don’t imagine he will be fighting with sticks or machetes any time soon. But I still nodded approvingly when Romanoff informed me of her plans to teach him anyway, because anything that will bolster his speed and agility will be a boon.

And he is moving faster, lighter on his feet, less like a dump truck and more like a large SUV, sleeker, better on the road. He’s still a little unwieldy, but there’s a limit to how quick and graceful you can be when you're composed of his materials.

There’s a cracking sound, and the two of them freeze, sticks locked in a hold, glaring except for the briefest glance he casts my way. Then Steve bears down, he’s falling into a power move that is most likely going to fail. Of course Romanoff doesn’t abide it, and she eases back just enough for his center of gravity to tip, then slips out of the hold and steps aside as he stumbles forward. He’s better at losing now, he’s gotten so used to it, and he rights himself, head shaking.

I creep out from my corner with two bottles of water in hand. They accept with the same modest dip of the chin.

“How’s it going?”

Steve takes a deep drink of his water and gives me a shrug. “About as well as that.”

“No, you’re catching on,” Romanoff supplies. Her eyes land on mine, and I don’t see any deception there.

“Wanna go a round?” he asks, one brow rising.

I do, actually. I’m feeling good today, spry and ready, hardly in any pain. But I need to keep it that way for the next six days. I’ve got a mission to plan.

“I have a meeting, so I can’t. But let’s do some shield work afterward.”

Steve’s face doesn’t fall as much as I suspected it might. He doesn’t even look surprised. I think he’s getting used to being disappointed. “Okay.”

“I’ll find you when I’m done.”

“Sure.”

Our eyes meet, and he gives me a halfhearted smile.

I fucking hate this.

I hate it as I stalk my way to the stairwell. The hate pushes me hard up the flights, twisting up and up, and at first I think it’s the lighting, maybe there’s a bulb out, but there’s a flash of luminescent gray and the stairs disappear and there’s a jerk as my boot catches and I’m gasping, falling, blind with it until my hands slam on the edge of one of the stairs. My vision begins to clear in piecemeal patches, and I scramble to my feet, hand thrusting out to grip the rail, my lips and fingertips tingling, head cottony and woozy. It’s… yeah, it’s just been a while since I ate. I assure myself of this repeatedly, work through my day backwards, three hours vanished just replying to emails and fielding phone calls before jogging to the conference room for a 90-minute V-tel training meeting with the West Coast team. Yeah. It’s been a while.

I don’t even close the door behind me, and I’m digging into the top drawer of my desk for one of the protein bars I have stashed for these forgetful times. I eat it standing up, fingers touching the edge of my desk, you’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine—

There’s a tap of knuckle against wall.

“Want me to come back later?” Harding asks.

I shake my head as I swallow the bite in my mouth. My eyes dart around as I consider our options. My usual parochial configuration is me behind my desk, the other person in a chair in front of it, good for times when I need the power dynamic to play out in my favor. But there is the couch and… maybe this is the time for that. Maybe this conversation requires that. So I motion her to it and the door closes behind her.

“How’s your Thursday going?” I ask.

She settles down and tips her head. “Same old, same old. Compiling reports, mostly. But at least Agent Walsh has me helping with some threat analysis stuff, so it’s not a total snooze.”

I stop just shy of the couch. What’s the right distance to sit? Is an arm’s length too unfriendly? Is less than that too familiar? I don’t know why I’m so preoccupied by this; it’s not like we haven’t sat so close that we were almost brushing knees.

And now she’s noticing. Fine, fine. I sit wherever my ass lands and angle myself toward her, hands coming to rest on my thighs.

“What do you want to be doing for SHIELD?” I ask.

Her eyes narrow, not a little suspiciously, like I’ve baited a trap for her. “What do you mean?”

I consider my words. “When you got into the academy, what did you picture for yourself?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It all seems so stupid now. I didn’t know anything about SHIELD, certainly not enough to make an intelligent choice. But I definitely didn’t want to be pushing paper.”

“Yeah, I don’t think your talents are being used very well.”

Harding is an ops graduate. The fact that she’s sitting at a desk most days is anathema to anyone with enough grit to make it through the program.

“I’d like to be in the field more. I’d like to be a Level 6.”

“You know that means you’d be on the road a lot.”

“I know. And that part wouldn’t be great,” she says, the weight of that unfriendly fact resting on her brow. “But at least I’d be doing what I signed up for.”

I give a pair of slow nods. “Maybe you need some mentorship.”

“Yeah, I’d love that. How to get it is another matter.”

“I can make that happen.”

Harding’s face sours. “I want to earn it on my own merit—”

“You have plenty of merit. But we’re in a glut right now, and I think it’s easier to lose sight of professional development when there are so many Level 4s on tap.”

“And you coordinating that mentorship wouldn’t look like favoritism?”

It could. Nobody can halt the perpetual motion of the scuttlebutt around here. If there’s one thing agents like more than weird alien artifacts, it’s talking shit about each other.

It’s moments like these that I sometimes feel like an NCO again, down in the dirty with one of my men, using the best parts of myself to help them be better. It was so selfless then, so natural, a wellspring of talent I didn’t know I had until I was doing it.

“If an officer sees someone worthy of development, it would behoove them to connect that person to developmental resources. Whether we’re friendly or not. I know a lot of Level 6s who would love a smart, hard working protege.”

She regards me with the kind of face that would be excellent in an interrogation, unblinking, unyielding, but not overly guarded. She’s a goddamn natural. She should be in the field.

“Look,” I continue, “I do have a little bit of clout. And if I could use it to advance the career of someone deserving, I wanna do that.”

“I’ll think about it.”

I really hope she does. I hope she lets me do this one thing for her. If I did, I think I’d feel okay. I know she’d be in good hands.

I ease back against the cushion. “There’s a very big op next week. I’m putting together my team. I’d like you on it.”

“What kind of op?”

“Oh, just a little Hydra action.”

Her back straightens. “I’m listening.”

I smirk. “You know I can’t give you details unless you agree.”

“That’s cruel.”

“That’s business.”

The sigh Harding gives is entirely feigned, weary and drawn. “I suppose I could put my paperwork aside for a few days.”

I am really going to miss her.

—

“Damn it.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

Steve’s shoulders droop as he walks the length of the room to retrieve his shield. All the vigor that boosted his steps after previous — but greatly diminished — flubbed throws has left him. Steve scoops his shield up and grips it hard in both hands, staring intensely into the star at the center of it as if it’s betrayed him. He looks to the wall, brows drawn, and then bends his arm and throws. It lands hard and angles toward me. I have to lean to the left, but Vibranium clangs against Vibranium as I catch it.

Steve gives a limp shrug. “Guess I still need more work.”

“You’re really close. Maybe you need to change your grip.”

I take it firmly in hand like an oversized frisbee, work the angle in my head, I can almost see the lines that stretch from myself to the wall and to the man on the other side of the room. I wind up and let go, and it sails straight, hits where I want it, and ricochets into Steve’s waiting hands, punching a grunt from him.

“Maybe it’s your release or something,” I say.

It could be that. But more likely it's that he just needs practice. He needs to be in here, every day, throwing and throwing like I did for the better part of a year, until I was perfect. Until I never missed.

“Or maybe I need to take up billiards,” Steve murmurs as he walks back to me.

That’s… really not a bad idea at all. “You’re doing a lot better already. I think you just need to integrate this into your daily routine. And you’ll get it in no time.”

“I should just come in to work with you every day.”

The idea sparks a current of joy in my chest. It would be nice to ride to work together, grab some coffees, watch the sun paint the sky pastel. I’ve enjoyed most of the mornings I’ve gotten to spend with him like this, in these past weeks.

“I think that’s a good idea. I also think you should start to familiarize yourself with the rest of our operations. Maybe shadow me.”

He smiles. “I’d like that.”

“I actually have a big mission coming up. I can get you clearance to be part of the planning process.”

“What kind of mission?”

My mouth quirks. “Just Hydra engaging in a new and highly disturbing enterprise in Colombia.”

“Really?” He perks up, resting his shield on the floor, propped against his leg. His arms cross over his chest. “When’s the mission?”

“We’re leaving Tuesday.”

“I want in.”

“No. You’re not ready.”

" _Bullshit_."

“No, not bullshit.”

“You know, this big brother routine of yours is really pissing me off.”

Steve's voice has dropped low, like the crackling of a fuse as it burns in the direction of a disaster. But I survived almost two decades of Steve Rogers trying to heft his weight around — 140 pounds, 240 pounds, it doesn't fucking matter. I didn't back down then, he wouldn't have respected me if I did. And I'm not about to start now. 

“It’s not a big brother routine," I say, my posture squaring. "I need people in top form. You’re not in top form yet. I’m sorry, it’s just facts.”

“I make 88% of my shots. I'd say that's pretty goddamn good.”

I huff out a dry laugh, I just can't help it. Of course he has his hit rate calculated and ready to toss in my face. “Yeah, well, when you make 98%, then we’ll talk.”

"I don't get it." He shakes his head, confused. Dismayed. "Since when are you the guy who won’t take a chance on me?”

“Since it became my job to hold back people who aren’t ready. And you don’t get a free pass just because you’re Steve Rogers. Or Captain America.”

“I’m not Captain America. Or did you forget that, too?"

I feel myself smiling, bitterly. "That's a nice pot shot, Rogers. Really. But if you think you're gonna bully and shit talk your way onto my field roster, you're living in a fucking dream.”

I expect an immediate recoil, like a kick in the shoulder from an overpowered rifle. But his eyes flit back and forth, the tiny tics of analysis. He’s almost squinting, as if he’s hunting me from a great distance.

“I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

I blink. I... Jesus. 

He stares me down for a few more moments before dipping to snatch his shield. He whips around fast, banking a shot that clocks spectacularly against the wall and cuts a straight course toward the dummy in the far left corner. It lands squarely in the head and with brutal force.

It’s so flawless that I forget myself entirely.

“Nice shot.”

“Fuck you,” he whispers.

—

Steve is petty but not quite petty enough to pass up my request for him to be at the mission planning meeting the next day. He stands, leaned petulantly against the briefing room wall in a SHIELD tac uniform, huge arms crossed over his chest, biceps straining the cuffs of his black t-shirt. The room is darkened to enhance holoprojection, casting his glowering face in a sinister glow.

Around the table stand Hill, Fury, Romanoff, Harding, and the rest of my hand-picked team of twelve. I hit a few buttons on the keyboard lit at my fingertips, and a three dimensional schematic of the facility hovers over the table.

“The top floor is their _clinic_. Patients come through this entrance and are escorted to these examination rooms.” A series of three rooms light up in red at the touch of a button, and each successive space lights up similarly as I guide the simulation forward. “The doctors do the procedures here. Our asset says that the place looks on the up-and-up. Reception desk, break room, everything.

“Down here…” The model shifts and the first basement floor lights up. “The first floor is a decoy. Storage, medical supplies, all that shit. But go down one more floor, via a biometrically controlled entrance here, and that’s when things start getting weird.”

“Agent Diaz said that there are at least two floors below this, but we can’t get imaging to confirm, and he wasn’t able to get further than sub-level two,” Hill adds.

Poor Diaz. It’s rough, damning work infiltrating Hydra, pretending to be them, abetting their abhorrent efforts just to give us this. It’s the kind of moral chess game some agents are exceptionally good at, sacrifice a pawn here or there for a chance at a checkmate. Deal with the existential consequences later.

I click ahead in the simulation after taking a moment to absorb the feel of the room. The energy is palpable but also refreshingly calm. It’s a good crew, level headed, competent. “Thermal imaging picked up a server room here, and we got EM signatures suggesting a hell of a lot of hardware down there and a hell of a lot of data streams coming in.”

“So we don’t really know what we’re walking into,” Hadi says.

“No and yes.”

We don’t know for sure, but we have assembled a cogent theory based on dispatches from Diaz and our imaging. Poor locals in Barranquilla, many of them old, come in for cataract surgery on the dime of a benevolent NGO. They get a new lens, essentially video cameras, and project to Hydra their every waking moment, becoming walking intel collection machines.

“We think they’re getting the signals here,” I say. “Probably sets of monitors. We don’t know if they’re also manufacturing the devices there or if they’re imported.”

“Are they really getting donations to fund this?” Harding asks.

I shake my head. “Not exactly. We think they’re making a nice profit using their old stealth sub technology to mule cocaine from Columbia to Florida along the Caribbean corridor. Guatemala is really cracking down on the traffic, so the cartels are very excited about their services.”

“Nazi drug trade, huh?” Boyle comments.

“Hydra aren’t Nazis.”

It’s the first thing Steve has said the entire briefing. I look to him approvingly, but he doesn't look back.

“That’s right,” I say. “Hydra is an entrepreneurial organization. They follow the money and resources. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Third Reich or the USSR or SHIELD or the cartels.”

A blanket of discomfort falls over the room at the mention of SHIELD’s past dealings, their past ignorance, their past complicity. Nobody likes to upturn that particular corner of the rug, but it’s a necessary reminder of just how fragile this organization is, how fragile any organization can be, in the face of such creative infiltrators.

“The mission is secure and capture,” I say firmly. “People, hardware, anything we can get.”

“Yeah, if they don’t off themselves first,” Steve mutters.

“We’ve had talkers from our past three missions,” I reply. “They’re having a bit of a loyalty crisis these days.”

Especially with the generous plea deals we’ve been handing out. I hate them, bereft of pity for even the most naive of souls to collaborate with Hydra and its subsidiaries. But without these traitors, we never would have known about this little macabre operation.

“Why these people? What useful intel could they get from them?” Romanoff asks.

“We think it’s a pilot program,” Hills says, leaning her thigh into the table. “Complications, deaths in an indigent, elderly population aren’t likely to arouse a lot of interest from the police.”

It’s all so fucking disgusting. It’s visceral, this feeling, like a hunk of rotten food that won’t ever work its way out of my digestive system.

“Capture. Seize.” I tap the tabletop with the knuckles of my fisted left hand. “Non-lethal force, unless you have absolutely no choice. Questions?”

Several hands rise. Steve looks to the floor.

—

They’ve given Steve a temporary office two floors below mine. Certainly nothing suitable for his rank, which they’re still debating on. I’m advocating for a Level 8, but like me, they seem to be torn between a genuine appraisal of his services and the historical urge to give him something befitting his reputation. He still hasn’t accepted a job offer yet, so they pay him as a contractor, and there are limits to access for anyone who hasn’t taken the oath of office.

Right now, I’m hunched over my laptop, reviewing my plans, double and triple simulating contingencies, waiting for Steve. We walked in silence from the briefing, he’s been not quietly simmering since yesterday, and being apprised of the mission specifics seems to have done little to soothe his resentment toward me. I’ve accepted it. Or, I’ve told myself that I do, hoping that the belief will take hold in a deeper place than it is now.

He appears in my doorway. He’s out of uniform, dressed in his best jeans and a painted-on t-shirt. My breath catches. Every time.

Steve walks to me and holds out a small day bag. “Would you mind taking this home with you?”

I feel myself frowning. “Why? Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Just out,” he says plainly, dropping his bag at the side of my desk. He smells… very good.

“And how are you going to get to ‘out’?”

“Uh, cab?”

“Bit of a walk to anywhere they can pick you up. They can’t come on the property.”

“Then I’ll take the Metro shuttle.”

I pull in a deep breath and push it slowly through my nose. “I can give you a ride.”

“No, thanks. I’ll be home later.”

And then he turns and walks out.

I press my palm to my forehead and hold it there, closing my eyes against a slithering, unsteady sensation. Will I ever stop regretting this? Will I be paying for this until the goddamn end? Is this our friendship now?

But ‘out’ doesn’t mean shit, I tell myself, as surely as I convinced myself of my untimely hunger yesterday. For all I know, he might be going to play pool. He might just be doing this to spite me. He could be sitting in a park, watching the tourists filter out of the museums at closing time.

I can almost see him on that bench, maybe wringing his hands together the way he does when he thinks nobody is looking. He gets nervous, I don’t think a lot of people know that about him. He worries. He’s got his ideals, he’s got his courage, he’s really so brave, but he’s only a man. No uniform, no shield, could ever obscure that from me. Sometimes I think I was the only one who could see it, and I held that truth close to me, precious, as the others tipped and bowed their heads to him. But I knew. And I loved that I knew. I loved being the only one who knew all of him.

I scowl and try to refocus on my work, shifting in my chair against a nagging tightness in my lower back, one that I can’t seem to wriggle away from. After enough fidgeting, enough worrying, I slam my laptop closed, gather my shit and his, and head home.

—

It’s after midnight, and I am still alone. I am alone, and I’m officially nervous, pacing the length of my apartment, passing my hand through my hair, stopping at the window to spy down the streets, looking for an oversized man with a strong gait, turning on my heel and treading the same worn course when I don’t find one. I take side trips to my orchids, feeling their soil, turning their pots while Duran Duran tell me about the ordinary world in an obnoxiously pointed way. I flail around in the nagging coincidence of it until I finally, _finally_ spot a shadow that’s familiar as he turns the corner from the better lit street to the dark of my own.

I rush to the couch, throw myself on it, and grab a copy of _The Atlantic_ from the coffee table, thumbing to the page I dogeared yesterday evening.

The door cracks open. He closes it behind him.

I smell him. Steve has definitely not been sitting in the park. I feel my lip curl as the bottom drops out of my stomach.

“Hey,” he says casually, dropping his keys in the bowl on top of mine.

I don’t say anything.

“What?”

I shake my head. I go back to my magazine. I try to look even marginally less furious, less scared, than I’m feeling.

He gives a snort, pads to the bathroom, and closes the door.

—

I take an unplanned trip to New York on Saturday. I fly first class and call a black car to take me into Manhattan. Tony is pleased to see me, uncharacteristic in his sputtering adamance about it, and I spend long hours in his shop with him, watching him test the thrusters on his new suit, genuinely awestruck at his genius, wholeheartedly laughing at his minor failures. He asks me about a Porsche he’s thinking of buying, and I’m shocked that he’s only considering it and that it’s not already acquired, but I suppose he’s growing more reasonable in his midlife. We eat and talk about bullshit, talk about Pepper, talk about his suits, talk about the company, and we don’t say more than a few sentences about Steve and even fewer about my body. It’s like the old days, even though it’s not, our ancient friendship continuing to flex its way through time, growing as we do. And it’s so simple.

I stay until Monday night. I let them feed me. I let the two of them be my friends. It feels like an anointing.

When I get back home, Steve is almost as aloof as when I left him, save for a pause in his voice just before he wishes me good luck as I head to work on Tuesday morning. And when the wheels of our stealth transport leave the tarmac at 16:30, I’m grateful, if only to be away from him and whatever the fuck has happened to us.

—

My hand is shaking. It’s shaking and shaking as I close my office door behind me. It’s shaking as I lay my shield against my desk. As I shuffle to my bathroom. As I sag at the waist, my vision splotching. As I unbuckle and make successive attempts to untie my rubble-coated boots. I fumble my hands over my utility belt and it drops to the floor. My pistol clanks against the tile as it lands. There’s a crisp snap as I rip open the velcro of my uniform and yank down the zipper, it feels so excruciatingly hot now, stiff as plaster, I wriggle out of it, tear at it until the top half is hanging limp at my waist. I pause there, breath just out of my reach, forcing me to work for every gulp of it. And I avert my gaze from the mirror as I flip on the sink faucet and shove my hands under the stream, I tremble as I pump out a palmful of soap and scrub and scrub, as russet-tinged water swirls down the drain, I’m heaving for air, sucking in loud breaths, my voice rough with pulverized cement. I strip down to nothing, littering the floor with spent clothes, blood oozes steadily from a gash in my side, and I shake under the blast from the shower, hacking until I’m spasming from it, until the violence of it drops me onto my knees and forces me to throw up all the water I pounded earlier trying to ease the tickle of grit in the back of my throat. I can’t fathom how much I breathed in, upending pieces of rubble, shouting their names, I collapsed there too, when we found them. Boyle curled unscathed in a miraculous pocket of safety. Takahashi with cuts and a bloody, frightful compound fracture I bandaged the best I could. Harding...

I press my palms to my head.

And I scream.

—

There’s a knock.

I don’t get up. I don’t move. I don’t say anything.

It happens again.

It could be Fury. It could be Hill. I need to be debriefed. I do not want to be.

There’s a beep, and my door opens. She shuts it behind her, regarding me with that same impenetrable look she gave me at The Chet. I should get up. The me of two days ago would never let Romanoff see me horizontal unless I was dead.

“Hey,” she says gently.

A part of me wants to ask how she can get into my office, if she does this to other people, if she gave me those files. But how could I possibly give a fuck about any of that now?

Her steps are light as she crosses the room. She stands a few feet away from the couch I’m curled up on, a safe distance. A professional one. She’s cleaned up, showered, changed out of her uniform, her hair a little damp as it frames the side of her scrutinizing face.

“How are you?” she asks.

“How is she?”

I should know this, but I don’t. She’s my agent. I should know everything about all of them in any moment. A good NCO would. A good mission controller would. But I couldn’t think. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t stand it. The not-knowing felt so much safer than what I feared to be true.

“In surgery at Houston Methodist,” she says.

I wait for her to tell me the rest, pulling my blanket tighter over my shoulders.

“Hill said there was some internal bleeding,” Romanoff continues. “A few broken ribs. Some early stage crush syndrome they got under control. If she makes it through surgery, she may recover. Takahashi’s probably getting some new hardware, but he’ll be okay.”

I close my eyes. I see Harding’s face, painted the same gray as the boots still strewn across my bathroom floor. Barely breathing. I see my hands. One steady. The other shaking. Shaking.

“I saw what happened,” she says.

“When what happened?”

She regards me with the distant disapproval of a teacher trying to wring a lie from a student. I’m not budging. I can’t make the words for what I think she could say next.

“I saw you miss.”

He was right there. He was running, sprinting for a door, one of the doors I didn’t have a schematic for. My shield was in my hand and I reeled around to throw it and— I lost him. He was there, and then he wasn’t. Nothing was. There was just a sickening sway and I threw, blind and into nothing. Into air. The shield clanked against the wall, a worse failing than even Steve could generate, and the door closed. The hall went red. The alarm blared. I yelled into my coms. Abort. Mission abort. Run. Run. Now. Get topside. Run. _Run._

I sit up slowly, swinging my feet onto the floor, blanket pooling on my lap, grimacing at the stabbing pain in my side. I press my hand to it, feeling the thick bandage through the thin fabric of my t-shirt.

Romanoff watches, her expression shifting. Sharpening. “Something’s going on with you.”

And... okay. I guess I'm on the bridge now. This is my gunpoint. She is my gunpoint. There is no turning back.

“Yeah.”

“So, are you gonna tell Fury, or am I?”

I swipe my hand over my face. “I will.”

She falls silent. Her posture loosens, a fraction of the defensive rigidity in her spine relaxing.

“How are you?” I ask.

“Hanging in there.”

In the collapsed, self-destructed ruins of the building, she was there with me, using her unusual strength to help me hurl slabs of concrete, calling out names of the unaccounted for. She sat across from me on the flight home, slumped back in her seat, arms curled over her stomach, me shaking, smearing Takahashi’s dried blood, my dried blood, into my hair, onto my face, as I mindlessly fell back on the childish rituals of self-comfort that haven’t left me since my dark days.

“Do you want some company?” she asks.

“To tell Fury? Definitely not.”

“I mean now.”

I don’t know why I feel it. Why my eyes are watering. At this. At her. God, I don't want to show her this, too. 

I dip my head, jaw clenching. “I'm fine.”

She could call me out again, and she would be right to do it. But if there’s one thing Romanoff knows, it’s when to speak and when to not. She invites the quiet now, makes space for me to swallow and breathe and gather up the loose threads of my control. 

I startle then, wincing. "Shit, did someone call her girlfriend?”

“I'm not sure.”

I need to. If I can do this one thing, I must. An officer writes letters for the dead and the near-dead. An officer tells the next of kin. An officer doesn’t let this happen at all.

“I’ll do it. I’ll tell Fury after.”

For the first time since barging in here, her gaze drifts away from me and down toward the floor. It's wandering. Unfocused. "Is it bad?"

“It’s bad." 

“I’m sorry.” It sounds like something close to sincerity, maybe as close as Natasha Romanoff gets.

I shrug. I should call Steve. I should let him know I’m okay. But I’m too afraid of what I’ll say to him right now. What I might do if I can't make any words come. 

I push myself to my feet, teeth clenched, hand drifting back to my side.

“I’m guessing you didn’t go to medical,” she says.

“It’s just a flesh wound.”

A knowing smile tips the corner of her lips. She fucking hates the docs almost as much as I do. “Well, let me know if you need anything.”

What I need, she can’t give. Nobody can. This is a road I have to walk alone, as all creatures must.

But I still try to smile back. I don’t think I’m doing it very well, so exhausted, so heartsick, that even curving my mouth feels like agony.

"Thanks." 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

It took hardly anything to enter the wrong building at Houston Methodist. The campus straddles two perpendicular streets, an assembly of ambitious buildings I can’t seem to find my footing in, too frayed with anxiety to ask for any kind of help. I wander my way through four buildings, head snapping to any signs that look promising, hands fisted at my sides. I’ve been awake for three days, I still haven’t been home, I still haven’t talked to Steve, save for a terse text that read, simply: _I’m alive_. He asked me to call. He started blowing up my phone when I didn’t. I let my personal phone run out of battery, just to relieve myself of him.

I’m saved, unexpectedly, by an intrepid volunteer, bright-eyed and hunched and ancient, she must be a foot smaller than me. She asks what I’m looking for and points with an arthritis-gnarled finger toward the elevator banks ahead.

“Do they have stairs?” I ask.

“Oh yes, that’s the healthy way,” she says with a chuckle. “Right down this hall, there’s a sign.”

“Thanks.”

She gives me a sweet smile. “My uncle fought in Anzio.”

I never know what to say when people feel compelled to tell me things like this. I landed there with 36,000 other men. Did she think we knew each other? It’s like when people ask if I knew Audie fucking Murphy. No, I did fucking not.

But she wants this moment of connection, and so I give it to her, even if I don’t do a very patient job of it. I ask her if she wants me to sign anything, take a picture, whatever, but she shakes her head and holds out her arms to me. I stare like a moron until I realize that she wants me to hug her, why the fuck—

I heave a sigh and drag myself forward. I stoop low and mechanically but carefully wrap my arms around her. Her bones must be just about dust now, and I don’t want to break her.

She pats my back. She smells like perfume and hairspray.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs. She pats me again.

Jesus Christ. I don’t need this shit. I don’t need it, but I also don’t pull away. I let myself have this small woman’s comfort.

My legs feel leaden as I climb the stairs to Harding’s floor. I glide my hand up the rail, counting the twists of the stairwell until I get to the right landing. The door squeaks as I push it open, smack in the middle of a ward hallway. A young nurse pushes a cart into the room just to my right, not even casting me a glance, let alone two. I spot the nurse’s station, but I don’t approach it. Instead, I wander slowly past the rooms, scanning over the names. I kindle some hope that this will buy me time to drag a few of my pieces together, which means I’m completely unprepared for her name to be scrawled next to the third door I pass.

I freeze. Shit. I peer through the crack in the doorway. I can’t see much, just linoleum floor, a strip of bed. There’s a gentle beeping coming from inside. The steadiness of it is metronomic, almost soothing, but it’s no match for the burbling geyser of anxiety that’s threatening to turn me around and send me back to DC.

I tap my knuckle against the door. It’s too quiet, or maybe she’s just asleep, and if she’s sleeping, I should let her. She needs to recover. She needs rest. She doesn’t need me barging in and—

I hear a voice say _come in_. It’s her voice, stripped thin, raw. My stomach clenches as I press my hand flat to the door and push.

The room is well-lit, natural sunlight, artificial light. The ubiquitous tang of hospital, of medicine, sterilization, overcooked food, is stronger in here. It’s not accurate to say that I detest the smell; it’s more visceral than that. It’s primordially terrifying. It vibrates through all my layers, cuts through the softness of my flesh, stabbing deep into the hard shell of my bones.

“Hey.”

The sound of her pulls me back, gives me a small anchor to tether myself to. “Hey.”

She blinks slowly, and a sleepy smile curves half of her mouth. “Wha’re you doing here?” Her words slur like a drunk’s. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.

“I wanted to see how you’re doing,” I say.

“Oh, just….” She looks down at her own body, her hospital gown, the bedding pulled up to mid-chest. “A little squished, I guess.”

God. God, I shouldn’t be here. Or maybe I should be. This is the price of my selfishness, and it only makes sense that I pay up.

“Is Vanessa around?” I ask.

“She went to grab lunch.” Harding gestures a weak hand toward the chair that’s been pushed up close to her bedside, close enough for a lover to touch her, for her to touch back.

I force myself to walk to it, to lower myself down. I sit back stiffly and curl my hands over the edges of the armrests.

“Did they give you a sense of when you’re getting out of here?”

Harding’s shoulder shifts minutely. “Maybe a week.”

I never asked exactly how bad the damage was. I curled up in the cocoon of not knowing that, along with all the other things I’ve been too scared to look at. My attention travels to the white board on the wall across from her bed. Your Doctor: Dr. Kouris. Your Nurse: Ana.

“I’m sorry.” I swallow. I feel my heartbeat in my neck, a trembling in my carotid artery.

“It’s the job,” Harding murmurs.

I shake my head. No, this was never supposed to be part of the job. There is an implicit contract of trust between agents and their leaders, their mission controllers. Tell me what to do, and I will, because I know you know me, and I know you know yourself. I’m supposed to be the mature one, the experienced one, the one who sees the past and possible futures with unshakable clarity, who sees in dimensions that others cannot.

But the past is loose earth beneath my slipping feet now, the possible futures contracted into one narrow path, flat and inevitable.

“This was my fault,” I tell her.

She makes a small, dismissive snort.

“I could have prevented it.”

Her eyebrows twitch together, but she doesn’t say anything.

“I’m sick.” I gather my hands on my lap. “I think I’m quite sick.”

“Like sick in the head or...”

She smiles crookedly, and my own mouth makes the same shape. Wouldn’t that be a nice, familiar story to tell? I’m good at being crazy. Unstable. Worrisome. But at least my body carted my damaged mind around perfectly, a smooth, predictable machine. A reliable friend.

“Sick-sick,” I say.

I tell her what I know. I tell her about Tony’s tests, about the mice, about the theory. I’m surprised by how much I can say about it, how intelligible it sounds. I’ve been meeting it in pieces until now, approaching and dodging, acknowledging and denying. But when I lay it out like this, it’s a pretty grim story, even though I never tell her that I’m dying. Like with Romanoff, I just say it’s bad. A sheen of worry falls over Harding’s features, blunted by whatever painkillers are sloshing through her system.

“And I knew. I knew I was starting to get compromised. I tried to brush it off, I just wanted to do this last mission, I thought if we did a good job, if I did a good job…”

I’ve worked out a promise to myself, based on a crude sort of math. Just do good, be good. Be the best, be at least as good at this as you were at that. Give until your legs collapse, until your insides are hollow, and rest in the knowing that you spent every part of yourself setting things right.

But I never thought of what would happen when I could no longer be the best. It never entered my consciousness. I don’t know how to exist when I’m failing. I don’t know what convolution the math takes when the body betrays, when death is a slow march that passes through error and indignity.

“I could have prevented this,” I repeat. “I made very specific mistakes. And I should have scrapped the op. Or had Romanoff take over.”

“Huh.” She considers it, sleepy but thoughtful. “Yeah, wow. Sounds like you really messed up.”

I know I did, I wouldn’t have believed her assurances otherwise, I _know_. But I didn’t expect her honesty to knife into my guts like this.

“I’m so sorry.” My words are so thick I can barely push them out. “I never wanted anyone to get hurt. I never wanted you to get hurt.”

I feel it then, a warmth on my knee. Her hand. She gives me a pat, like the old Anzio woman. Doesn’t she remember the briefings? I am a foreign object. I am alien space trash. My expulsion was earned. I’m okay with it. I’m okay. I am...

But her hand is there still. She squeezes me.

I take it between my own, gentle, careful around her IV line. I sag at the waist, touch my forehead to the back of my own hand.

And I’m crying.

“Sometimes the hard part is letting go,” she says softly. “Knowing when to stop.”

I sniffle and make a horrible, wet sound. She’s right. God, she’s right.

I need to let go. I need to stop.

I need to stop all of this.

—

I lay two bags on the edge of Fury’s desk, one flat and round, the other made from black canvas, bulging and heavy with my uniform. My boots. My belt. Every SHIELD-issued weapon except for my sidearm.

Fury’s eye lands hard on mine. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

I nod and step back a couple feet.

“You don’t have to. We can pull you off the roster for a while, until you get better.”

“This isn’t the kind of thing you get better from.”

“I’ve been in touch with Stark. We’ve got sci-tech working the problem.”

I snort. “Seems like kind of a waste, don’t you think?”

“To try to keep one of our most valuable agents alive? No. I don’t think so. This isn’t exactly SHIELD’s first super-serum rodeo.”

“Yeah, maybe Zola left some notes. Did you check his desk after he worked for you for 27 years and then turned himself into one of your computers?”

He doesn’t dignify this with a response. But I seem to be on some sort of pitiful roll, so I continue on.

“You know, all these people working on one problem for one man instead of finding the cure for Alzheimer’s or some shit…” I scoff and shake my head. “It’s ridiculous.”

“Well, fortunately you don’t get to determine how we allocate our scientific resources.”

“Bullshit,” I mutter.

Fury regards me for a few moments, searching my face. He’s not stupid; he knows there’s something off about my act, though not that even I know exactly what. Ever since I left Houston this morning, I’ve been floating in a gauzy sort of numbness, not quite resolute, but something adjacent to it. I don’t know why my steps aren’t quite landing.

“Do you need to maybe... see someone?” he asks.

My head tilts sharply to the side. “About what? Dying? Pretty sure I can figure it out on my own.”

“We have an employee assistance program. You could—”

But I’m laughing too hard to hear the rest. It’s wild, unhinged, charged with something besides just the humor of it all, and it doesn’t please him. He’s giving me one of his most withering looks, the kind that usually cuts junior and senior agents alike into silence. But not me. Not today. Not anymore.

“And have some two-bit therapist tell me that I’m depressed or some shit because I think an unethical, Quixotic, medical Hail Mary is a bad idea?”

Fury threads his long fingers together and sits back in his chair, like you do when waiting for a toddler to expend its way through a tantrum. And I guess I do, because the humor saps out of me, suddenly, until I’m chuckling at nothing, hollow and dishonest. Is any of this honest?

“I’m sorry, Nick.”

“Yeah, well, I suppose you have an excuse for being an ass right now.”

“I don’t need a therapist,” I state. “I’m fine. I’ve got it figured out.”

He quirks an eyebrow. “And what did you figure?”

My spine straightens, and I’m a semblance of myself again, the self I try to be at work, the composed thing that other people could maybe respect. “I think it’s time for Steve to step up. He’s making very good progress. A few months and he’s going to be extremely capable. He’ll take the job. He just needs a little persuasion.”

Fury swivels in his chair a little. “I did think he’d jump for it, by now.”

“Well, I’ve been really hard on him. I think he’s a little demoralized.”

“Then stop demoralizing him.”

When I smile, it’s genuine but tinged with shame for how I’ve been treating him. It’s just… I want him to be ready. I want Steve to be the best man he can be. I want the world to know him, to love him, in ways that I could never let them.

“I know. I will. I’m gonna keep encouraging him to settle down. Take a formal offer.”

“And what are you gonna do?”

“I can still sit in a chair and go like this.” I hold my hands in front of myself and make swift typing motions.

“Yeah, you are pretty good at that.”

Ops Academy’s graduation is in three weeks. I want to be there. I want to see if that little guy is going to make it. I want to walk through the building, one last time. I want to see what I helped build. To know it will continue on without me.

“What's sci-tech gonna do?” I ask. “Tony’s people have already burned through most of the avenues already.”

“We’ve got some ideas,” Fury says cryptically. “Just let us take care of it.”

I don’t suppose I’ve got much of a choice.

—

I dally around my office until it gets dark. Steve has switched to harassing me on my work phone — _Please call me. When are you coming home? I’m worried about you._

There’s not enough energy left in me for my eyes to roll. They shouldn’t even be rolling at all. I should consider myself among the fortunate to have someone who cares like this. _When are you coming home?_ Truly, it’s not a question I ever thought I’d have the chance to be dick enough to not answer.

I take a very long shower, hands passing over my body. Beyond the rote motions required for cleanliness, I need to feel myself, _my body’s my friend, I’m in harmony, my body’s my friend, now I’m flowing free, no one can take this feeling away from me,_ but I can press now, beneath a thinning layer of muscle. I can feel ridges of ribs, I touch them with a dislocated fascination, count them. I haven’t counted them since Kreischberg, how else do you alleviate the boredom of captivity, while you and your buddies divvy up slabs of stale, molding bread? I did it with glassy-eyed fascination, curled in my small corner of our cage, bars digging into my back. I hadn’t felt them since I was a kid, in that skinny peripubertal place where broadness hasn’t caught up with height. But this isn’t right, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go, my body wasn’t supposed to turn on me, eat itself, I tried my best, I did, I did my best— my vision tunnels, the lines of the tiles go diagonal, I touch my arms, my legs, I crouch down and fold myself, make myself small, hug my shins, breathe into my knees until the dizziness begins to feel familiar. This is panic, thank God. Okay. I know this. I _know_ this. It’s fine. I’m okay.

I lift a trembling arm and turn off the water. I breathe and breathe until it feels manageable, until I can rise with some meager confidence that I won’t keel.

_When are you coming home_?

I dry myself slowly and wrap my towel around my hips. I swipe my phone off the counter.

_I’m coming home now. See you soon._

—

Despite notifying him, Steve rushes me at the door. He’s wide-eyed and swift like my _mame_ the first night I came home too late, sweaty and elated from dancing and from after. I didn’t care that she was waiting up, I knew she would be huddled on the couch in her robe, assuming I’d been beaten to death in some alley. Surely sixteen wasn’t old enough for anything else. She berated me in a harsh and semi-intelligible tirade of Yiddish, and I argued back in English just to piss her off, yet another practiced rejection of her. Go pack yourself back to your _shtetl_ , beg them to take you back, if you love it so much. Leave me out of it. My father had to break us up, in his gentle, patient way. He took her by the shoulders, assured her that I didn’t mean it as he gave me a weary look, we would talk later. But we rarely actually did. He was always too kind when we went after each other, in those few years when our love had become painful.

Steve lets out a sigh. And he’s the one taking me by the shoulders now, squeezing a little too hard, expression shifting between relief and anger and concern.

“I was worried,” he repeats. My body jolts as he gives me a shake.

“Sorry.”

He lays a palm on my cheek and takes it away just as fast. Are we in Austria again? Are we coming full circle?

There’s a pressure in the center of my back as Steve guides me to the island and manually sets me down on one of the stools. He fills a glass of water and another with orange juice and sets them both in front of me.

“Do you want something to eat?”

I shake my head.

“How’d the mission go?”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I know what the masters would say: the wise men would shove me into the untread wilds, the place where the truth grows in thatched, brambled patches. I don’t know why the easier road feels so exhausting now, why walking the worn path of diversion feels like a hardship. I’m so tired. I don’t want to be in control anymore. I want to be a vessel for reality to pour from. I want to let go. I want to fall.

Steve leans into the island across from me, hands braced on the granite. He has really claimed this space, hasn’t he? Wasn’t this me just a few months ago, and me him?

“It wasn’t good,” I say.

His brow furrows. “What happened?”

“I have to tell you something.”

And here it is. Maybe I should have thanked Romanoff for this. For this freedom. For this unburdening. I will tell him and he will know and I will be a vessel again for him to crumble into. I have been that before. I am still strong enough to bear him. I think.

“What is it?”

I do take a drink of water first. I set it down on the stunning blue-gray of the stone slab. I remember picking it, I drifted my hand over samples, waiting until I touched just the right one, intuiting that I would know it when I did.

“So, the serum, my serum, has an accelerated program of cell death to compensate for the overgrowth of new tissue. Or else I’d be like the Hulk, maybe, just a big monster. This enzyme called a caspase regulates cell death to keep the growth in check.”

I search Steve’s face for comprehension and find it there. “Okay.”

“It’s a perfectly balanced system. It works well, in a young person. The growth is set at a specific rate, the death stays matched to it. Until, I guess, the person starts to get older. Regeneration slows, but for me, the cell death keeps going the way it always does.” I lift my hands, palm up, like a pair of scales. I shift them, my left hand dropping down, my right hand rising. “In other words, no more balance. Cells die faster than they’re regenerated. Just in certain systems, apparently. I think my lungs. Maybe my stomach. My head... I don’t know. There are all these different caspases, they work in all these different ways. I can’t keep track of it.”

Steve doesn’t urge me along. He’s processing all of it, the implications, as far as he might be able to stretch them.

“About ten months ago, I started feeling off. More tired, lost a little weight. I go to Tony for maintenance, and he takes my blood. Does a few scans. And it was not good.”

“What wasn’t good?”

“I’m kind of shutting down.” My tone waivers, and I press my lips together. “He said it’s probably been happening for a while, but I had enough reserve not to notice. But I’m still losing weight. I’m dizzy. Less hungry. Coughing. Sick, all that shit.”

“So what does that mean?” he presses.

“I don’t think I was meant to last very long. I see why they kept me in a freezer.”

“But what are you saying? Is there a cure for it?”

I shrug. “Tony’s still working on it. SHIELD is now too, I guess. But I’m done with field work. I told Fury. Turned in my uniform. The shield. I’m done with that. This last mission, I almost got people killed. I fucked up. Got dizzy. Missed a shot I never should have missed. And I think I just need to be done.”

And here’s the part where I expect it to land. I expect this will be the place where Steve takes this to its natural conclusion. Done. I’m heading toward done. And fast.

But his eyebrows rise and then fall. He doesn’t look particularly impressed. “That’s a little premature, don’t you think?”

“Premature?” I lean forward in my seat, forearms resting on the countertop. “Did you just hear the part where I almost got a bunch of people killed? I put Harding in the hospital. That’s where I just came from. Another guy’s gonna be full of metal for the rest of his life.”

Steve has the temerity to shrug. And— I suppose I get that. He’s lost men. When they stormed Schmidt’s nest, I know they lost a lot of soldiers. He lost people when he jailbroke the 107th. People died as a matter of course, back then. So why can’t he understand? Isn’t this a matter of course, too?

“You don’t have to stop,” he says. “It’s all part of the risk. They know what they signed up for.”

I huff. God, this shit again? Did someone spike the city water supply or something?

“It’s just a setback.” Steve is relaxing, his shoulders slacking, knees unlocking. “They’ll figure something out.”

I try to impress upon him the seriousness of this, the gravity of it. I use my voice when my body language doesn’t seem to be working. “Tony’s gonna hit the last wall soon. There’s nowhere to go from there. There’s one more caspase to try, and then that’s it. Just a fucking vat of dead mice.”

“From what you’ve told me,” he says with a wry smile, “Tony’s not really a guy who lets a wall stop him.”

No. He’s got me there. I don’t think he’ll stop until I’m actually dead.

This was exhausting, too. This is all exhausting. My life is fucking exhausting.

Steve pushes back from the island. He digs through the cupboard for a plate and flits around, combing through our supply of snacks, rummaging through the fridge. He loads up the plate with odds and ends, salty and sweet, garbage and produce.

He sets the food between us and pops a kalamata olive in his mouth. He nudges it all in my direction, and I take a hunk of cubed gruyere.

“They’re gonna find something.” He’s sure of this, in ways I don’t think I ever have been. “I get stepping back for a little while, makes sense. But this is nothing. You’ve survived— God, you fell off a mountain! And you’re here.”

“I know.”

It falls flat, resigned. Steve seems blissfully content to ignore it as he crunches through his tortilla chips and bites a late-season strawberry off of its stem. A thin trickle of pink juice slides down his chin, and he wipes it off with the back of his hand.

I want very urgently to kiss him. I want to yank him by the collar, drag him to me, and kiss him. I want to smear my tongue over him and lay him on the kitchen floor and fuck the sense back into him, I want to fuck him angry, despairing, I want to growl and moan and I want his arms around me. I want to lay in them and stop.

“Maybe I could just give you a blood transfusion,” he says casually.

“If you wanna kill me right now, sure.”

“Oh yeah, we have different types, huh?”

“Yep.”

“It’s gonna be okay. You got more lives than a cat.”

The shake of my head is weary. I shove a baby carrot into my mouth and sag back in my stool.

Steve rights himself, brushing his hands together. “Want me to draw you a bath?”

“Draw me a bath?” I chuckle. “That’s very old fashioned of you.”

One eyebrow arches. “You know I’m actually old fashioned, right? And why is a bath old fashioned?”

I smile. It’s not the bath I’m talking about. Even wiping chip salt off his hands, there’s something so charming, almost Old World, in his manner.

“You just really look like you could use a good soak,” he says.

Maybe there’s a reason I haven’t looked in the mirror since Tuesday. I’m beginning to think that I might not even recognize myself.

“I can do it.”

“No,” he says firmly. “Just let me.”

There’s no room for argument in his tone. And I’ve done enough labor today, haven’t I?

“I like the lavender salt. Third shelf.”

Steve gives a formal bow, bending at the waist, his right hand graceful as it extends in one smooth motion, fingers stretched. I forget that those powerful hands can also be delicate, that they can etch the finest lines, they are the kind of hands a surgeon would sell a firstborn for.

“As the gentleman wishes,” he says, then rights himself with liquid control and swishes off to the bathroom.

—

I sigh and sink deeper into the tub. Getting this thing installed almost took an act of God, but it’s a gift that seems to have no limit to its giving. I went so long without one that I’d nearly forgotten the comfort of it, the feeling of release, the pull on my sore muscles. Bathing was never this kind of luxury growing up, to drop into the too-cold water that the rest of your family had already used to wash the day off of themselves. I offered to be the last, consistently, even after my _mame_ insisted. I hated that she was the last of us, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Steve and his ma had it worse in the rooms they rented on her meager salary. It’s one thing to bathe in your own family’s dirty water, but it’s another entirely to be forced to do the same with people you don’t even know. It was another shock of modernity to him, knowing that he didn’t have to use it after me, that he could bathe twice a day if he wanted, the water all his own. He’s slowly accustomed himself to it, like a young hedonist learning the ways of the privileged.

Is that what’s gone wrong? Has he become so enchanted by modern life that he can’t comprehend one in which science doesn’t save me? He was made from science, I suppose. Why wouldn’t he bank his faith in it? Didn’t Howard promise it to us? He said there was no problem science couldn’t solve, with enough time.

There’s a soft knock at the door.

“Hm?”

“I’m so sorry,” Steve says, and he sounds it, “but I’m about to piss in your kitchen sink.”

I look at my bare wrist, at the place I usually wear my watch. The band of it is dangling over the edge of the counter, feet away. I probably have been in here for a while.

“Please don’t,” I reply. “You can come in.”

He enters with another apology and pulls the door shut behind him. He’s not so terribly graceful as he strides to the toilet and flips up the lid and seat. He pulls down the band of his sweatpants and briefs and takes his dick out.

Nothing happens. Steve sighs and shifts his weight on his feet, then glances at me out of the corner of his eye, catching me as I stare.

“You shy?” I say, feeling the stretch of my smile.

“No,” he insists, shoulders squaring. “But don’t look.”

“Fine, fine.”

I lean my head back against the rim of the tub and gaze up at the ceiling. It takes a few long seconds before the sound of it starts to ricochet off the walls. There’s an audible exhalation from him, relief, and I fight the desire to see his face as he does it, if his eyes close as his mouth slips open. But my self-control wins, and he pisses for what seems like a full minute. I don’t look again until I hear the toilet flush.

“Put the seat down,” I murmur.

He shoots me a weak glare and does as he’s told. A bathwater-warm sensation floods my chest. I don’t know why I like this so much, the simple ease of it, two people angling and curving around each other as they move through their day, bumping and accommodating, fond and annoyed. Comfortable. Maybe this is what all the TV shows were getting at in their quirky anecdotes about love.

The word halts my thoughts abruptly. Clears a thick cache of worries and complaints and problems that seemed just so important, as essential as life. I don’t know where they go at times like these.

Steve washes his hands and approaches, and I feel the exposure acutely. The water is clear, I am naked in it, my face is naked, I know it must be. His gaze travels over me, his chest expanding as he breathes in. I don’t expect for him to drop down on the edge of the tub, for him to reach into the water and take me by the ankle, for my body to sink even deeper as he lays my heel on his lap and starts rubbing my foot.

A moan escapes me, a surprising sound that gains richness as it echoes through the space.

Steve smiles. “You did this for me, once.”

My head drifts to the side. “Did I?”

He nods. “It was sweet. I was embarrassed, though.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “It felt really intimate.”

It is, isn’t it? I don’t have the greatest feet. He doesn’t either. You can’t have nice feet when you do the work we do, hard days spent in boots, running, jumping, pivoting, earning blisters and thick patches. I at least keep my nails well trimmed, I slather them in lotion before bed, I can’t sleep without it. Nobody does this, though. Nobody does this for me, ever.

I let my eyes drift closed, let my right hand drift over my thigh. I’m here, he’s here, this feels very, very good. I don’t remember a life before this moment. I can’t find a future. I only want this. I sigh, loudly, as he presses his thumb into the ball of my foot.

“Are you gonna be home for a few days?” he asks softly.

“I dunno.”

“You should take a few days. Sleep. Relax. Take lots of baths. I’ll go in, leave you alone.”

I shake my head, eyelids cracking open.

“C’mon, Bucky. You’ve gotta take care of yourself.”

“You don’t have to go in.”

“No?”

I want him here. I want to sit with him. I want to cook and I want him to eat. I want to wake up and look downstairs and see him, sleeping, reading, staring up at the ceiling with a pensive look, imagining whatever he does when he thinks he’s not being watched. I want him to use my apartment like a jungle gym, I want to smell his sweat, I want to feel that weightlessness in my guts as I watch him flex, as I give thanks for the way his pants are just a little too tight in the ass and crotch. I think about him naked, more than I should, the thought of fucking him, the memory of it, now visits me like a familiar comfort in the boring times, in meetings, in mandatory trainings, any place where I know I’ll be sitting for a while. Anywhere I can check my brain and have a hard-on and nobody will know. It feels subversive. Precious.

I circle my fingers around my half-hard dick, wake it up the rest of the way with a few gentle strokes. Steve’s own hand stutters, as he watches me do it.

I swallow. The request stalls, I’m not sure why I feel so shy about it. He seems to sense my hesitation, because his eyebrows rise.

“Take off your shirt.”

He lays my foot back on his leg and, without a hint of hesitation, peels off his t-shirt. He drops it onto the bath mat and goes back to rubbing. He’s smiling with the congeniality of a cabana boy, dutifully at my service. I don’t know if he’s trying extra hard to flex and release his muscles, but Jesus, it’s the greatest show on Earth.

“You like this?” he asks.

I nod.

He jerks his chin toward where my hand is smoothing up and down my cock. “You want me to rub something else?”

I shake my head.

“You sure?”

“I want this.”

Steve makes a little ‘hmm’ of acknowledgement. Then:

“Did you like being inside me?”

I huff. “Yeah. Of course.”

“Did you like shoving me down?”

Yes. Shoving him down, riding him hard, all that power beneath me, taking me—

“Did you like coming inside me?”

I squirm, and my hand moves faster. “Yeah.”

“Did you like coming in my mouth?” He wets his lips.

“Yeah, God.”

He nods to my straining cock. “You sure you don’t want me to help?”

I bend my knee, drawing up my free leg. I spread for him.

“You want me to touch you there?” He’s looking lower than my hand, lower than my balls.

I shake my head. I would do it myself, but this is the limitation of having a metal limb — it doesn’t feel particularly nice for things like that. And I can’t accept what he wants to give. I have to learn to stop taking and taking from him. From everyone.

So I imagine his mouth on me again. Two big, warm hands caressing me. I wanted to sink, I wanted to float, I wanted to die right then, purge myself with his touch, just as I purge myself now with my own, teeth clenched together, making my aneurysmic o-face, I guess. Steve exhales sharply, and his hands tighten around my foot as he pulls it against himself in the unconscious way we pull and push ourselves toward pleasure. I feel his erection against my heel. He rubs me through my orgasm, as my hand loosens and I finally release my jaw and a weak breath with it. I am boneless. My flesh arm drifts.

Steve lets go of my foot, and I see what has caught his attention — my come, floating along the surface of the water, a coagulated little cloud. He reaches out a hand to try to catch it, but it’s like chasing a piece of eggshell out of a bowl of yolk.

“God damn it,” he mutters.

I shrug one shoulder. “Just leave it. It’ll break down.”

But he’s determined. He finally catches it in two cupped hands and carries it victoriously to the sink, dripping water all over the floor. He washes his hands, bent at the waist, hips back, keeping a distance between his body and the counter. I see why, and very clearly.

“Want me to take care of that?”

“Nah, it’s fine. Just relax,” he replies, straightening and drying off his hands. “Want some music or something?”

I turn up my palm and regard my fingertips. “I should get out. I’m turning into a raisin.”

Steve returns, stands over me, and I crane my head up to look at him. His sweats are still tented quite dramatically, and beyond that, up the length of his body, he is perfect. It’s more than a little distracting.

He lays his hand on my head and runs his fingers through my fringe. I lean into him like a touch-starved dog begging for a pet.

“Wanna watch a movie or something?” he asks.

“Did you understand me earlier?”

“What part?”

I wrap my hand around his wrist and stop him. I look him in the eyes, hard, and I’m begging for this, too. For him to hear me.

“I’m dying. I think I’m really dying.”

He pushes out a small sigh through his nose. He pries my hand free and holds it loosely as he goes back to stroking my head.

“I’m sure it feels really hopeless right now, but it’s not. Tony’s gonna figure it out. Or SHIELD will. You’ll feel better about it after resting.”

I must have slipped into some alternate universe at some point in the last few days. It’s the only explanation for why nobody is hearing me, nobody is understanding me. It’s like talking to Peggy in those first couple of days back, I know I was speaking English, I knew she could understand me even if I wasn’t, but she just didn’t get it. She _wouldn’t_ get it.

But it was still true.

“I’ll call out for a couple days.”

“Good.”

“Thanks for pampering me.”

“Anytime. Really. I like it.”

Steve steps back as I rise to my feet, my legs still a little gelatinous. I step onto the bath mat and drip all over his discarded shirt.

He’s there again, draping a towel over my shoulders. I pull it around myself, and he brushes his fingers close to my side wound, the one that wouldn’t stop bleeding until I finally capitulated and let the doc throw a few stitches in it.

Steve dips into the second drawer and pulls out a large, gauze square and a roll of surgical tape. He dabs over the stitches with my towel, and his hands are tender as he bandages me up, his concentration rapt. He does a pretty good job, the edges only a touch uneven.

He stands and takes my face in his hands. He looks at me, smiling, and tilts my head down. Kisses my forehead. And I want to collapse. I want to beg him, please, _please,_ and I don’t know what I’d be asking for, because I don’t know how to ease this kind of want. I don’t even know what it’s called.

I cover his hands with my own, brush my fingers over his knuckles. We stay like that for a long time.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

I startle at the sound of my ringtone, scrambling through my tac pants when I don’t find it where I always put it. It’s in my left cargo pocket. It’s never in my left cargo pocket.

There’s a sharp hitch in my chest. I answer.

“Hello, Anthony.”

“James.”

“What’s up?”

He pauses. I wait for him to tell me what I think he’s probably calling to tell me. I’ve been waiting for the news with trepidation and excitement. Caspase 14 was a failure. I’m cooking up another harebrained plan right now.

“What do you think of _Wicked_?” he says.

It hits me like a non-sequitur — not just because I don’t comprehend what he’s asking, but because it violates every expectation that has accumulated over these past weeks.

“What do I think of _what_?” I sink back into my chair.

“The musical. Have you seen it?”

I snort and give a dismissive jerk of my head. “Do I seem like a guy who’s seen a lot of musicals?”

“I dunno. Kind of.”

“Why? Want me to go with you?”

“I wanna get Pepper tickets to something. I keep saying I will, but I haven’t.”

“You’ve never taken her to a show?”

“Look, I’m ad libbing this whole thing, okay?”

I have an idealized and cinematic image of what dating should look like. My own dating history is pretty unimpressive, some drinks, some dancing, lots of low-to-no cost strolling and picnicking in Prospect Park. It certainly never included going to Broadway. Who could afford that?

“Yeah, I think you skipped a few steps in the mandatory New York City courtship process.”

“Yes, yes, guilty. Do you think she’ll like it?”

I shrug to my empty office. “I have no idea what it is, but I really don’t know if you’ll make it through a musical.”

He swears under his breath. “That’s what I thought.”

“And if you’re looking for romantic advice from me, you’re delusional. Why don’t you ask Happy?”

“What does he know?” he grumbles.

“He’s a romantic guy.”

I know he considers Happy a friend, even if he might deny it. But I wonder if he’s ever stopped to just listen to the man. He hardly shuts up when he’s driving me around. He seems oddly compelled to tell me about this “girl” he’s seeing, as if he also is seeking some sort of approval. I always give it with few notes. I wonder if Tony even knows that Happy has a life outside of his well-compensated servitude to Stark Industries.

“How do you know? You guys been on a date?” Tony asks.

“I don’t think I’m really his type.”

There’s a breathy laugh and the sound of something rattling in a manic rhythm, some tool or another clanking against the stainless steel of his bench, possibly rustled by a nervous hand.

“I didn’t just call to ask your unhelpful opinions about musicals,” he says.

“I figured.”

And even though I figured, I really did, I still brace myself, spine rigid, abdominals clenched.

“I have an update on fourteen.”

He doesn’t even have to say it. His tone says it all. It’s the defeat I heard last time I was in the city, the one that’s damming up the deluge of his desperation. I linger in silence until he gives me the news. I think I need to hear it, unsolicited.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why it didn’t work.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not—”

“I know you hate it when I say that, but you did your best. That’s all you can do.”

And then I’m boneless, like I just shot off a load in the tub. It’s the perverse ecstasy of relief. It’s bodily. It’s profound. I feel my lips stretching into a small smile.

“You sound awfully cheerful about it.” Tony’s clanking is loud enough that I have to hold my phone away from my ear.

“I’m just glad we don’t have to fuck around with it anymore. I hated not knowing.”

Tony makes a noncommittal sound. _Clang, clang, clang_. When it stops, I imagine the gears in his engineer’s mind shifting into motion, diverting around this obstacle, looking for the next escape route.

My brows tighten. “Look, whatever you’re planning next—”

“How’s the arm?”

I’m grateful now for Tony’s inability to rest in any sort of silence, companionable or uncomfortable. It’s all intolerable to him. I’ll take his out, a diversion to familiar lands.

“It’s okay,” I say, flexing it unconsciously.

“I’m working on an update for your neural unit.”

“Another update? I told you I’m off combat duty.” There’s no fucking point, really. Who cares if I get a few extra pounds of flexion or torque?

“If it works, it’ll up your tactile density by almost 2%.”

“Great,” I mutter, though I shouldn’t sound so disappointed. I think idly, distantly, about what it might feel like to touch with more sensation. Not the touch that hurts, but a touch that can make someone feel good. Maybe myself. Maybe someone random. Maybe Steve.

“It _is_ great,” Tony says. “I am great.”

I smirk. “You are.”

His next words are muffled to the point of nearly needing repeating. “Is Rogers around next week?”

“Next week, yeah. Until Saturday.” That’s when I’m packing him off to the academy for a stay there. I even planned a guest lecture for him, over his half-hearted objections about not wanting to be the center of attention. Says the star-spangled man who starred in his own international USO show. “Why?”

“Fury’s invited me down for a little Arc presentation. He wants it, no surprise there. Figure I owe Rogers a small apology for my whatever when he was here.”

I feel my face form an almost cartoonish expression of disbelief. “You’re actually gonna apologize to him?”

“Well,” he predictably qualifies, “something like that.”

Which means, as I’ve learned from experience, words that have a high probability of coming off as disingenuous, to the uninitiated receiver. Tony’s genuineness, especially when contrite, is often so heavily packaged in sarcasm or dismissal that it can easily go unrecognized.

“Wow. I’m impressed,” I tell him. “Maybe we can grab drinks while you’re here.”

“Can’t. It’s gonna be a turn and burn, sorry.”

My gut heavies. I think it’s the sensation of disappointment. “Okay. Next time.”

“I will wine and dine you when you’re in town for your update. I promise.”

“See?” I say, my smile re-emerging. “You are romantic.”

He scoffs and begs off the call with some excuse about some meeting I know he probably doesn’t have or, if he does, will try to squirrel his way out of attending. God knows I’ve used the excuse enough times to have some respect for it.

I set my phone back down on my desk and draw my hand back onto my lap. It’s done. I’m done, like a roast, a Thanksgiving turkey, stick a fork in me, call it a day. Metaphors swirl lazily around my consciousness as I disembody from them, watch them with the curiosity of a tourist. I’m not surprised. I’m not sad. I’m not angry at the injustice of it. There is no injustice here. This is a necessary stop on any ride, as the car crawls back into the station when it’s all over. I search for any emotion and pull my hand away empty.

I minimize my emails and log onto the HR system. I calmly update my beneficiaries on my immense retirement fund, which has been growing with an almost exponential fervor since I made some careful investments after 9/11 and the 2008 housing crash. Whoever gets my cash won’t have to work again, especially if they keep investing with even a hint of skill.

Whoever? I shouldn’t be coy. I allocate 75% to Steve, the rest to Rebecca. I do the same for my life insurance. I call my lawyer, request an update on my will. I need to make sure my apartment goes to him. The last appraisal clocked it in at almost a million with the location, the upgrades, the renown. Who wouldn’t wanna live in the apartment that the notorious and dead Bucky Barnes dwelled in? These simple actions fill me with a calm that I didn’t realize I was lacking since— God, I don’t even know how long I’ve been craving this. I don’t know why I haven’t done this before.

When I’ve plowed through my tasks of bequeathment, I sigh and sink back. I swivel my chair toward the windows, the breathtaking view of the Potomac at sunset, the early glimmer of city lights. This is fine. I can handle this, knowing things are in place.

Now, all I have to do is wait.

—

I hear voices outside my door. Steve’s voice, Romanoff’s voice, talking so low that I can’t exactly hear them. But the tone can be discerned, and it’s a friendly one. I’ve been lingeringly suspicious about her dedication to Steve and his training; it’s most certainly below her station and capabilities, but her commitment has yet to waiver. She still leaves for stretches, sometimes alone, sometimes with Barton, sometimes with a small team. She disappears into dark ops and re-emerges days later, ready to take Steve back to the mat or to pull him into her office for instruction on stealth and subterfuge. She’s been helping him with his legwork, agility and jump drills, kickboxing, Taekwondo. She and I decided after some lively discussion that his legs might actually be his greatest weapon. It was a novel concept. I don’t think anyone imagined Captain America as a kicker.

But God, is he. He kicks breathtakingly high and with increasing speed, power, and precision. Last week Romanoff called me down to the fight lab, where Steve clocked a stationary kick at 982 psi and a running one at 1247 psi. The look he gave me was triumphant, and I was too staggered by the numbers to do much more than gape. When Steve Rogers wants to show you, he will show you. The man lives to shove people’s words back into their faces. His very existence is a walking, talking ‘fuck you’ to the world. And this is a ‘fuck you’ to me. Can’t say I didn’t earn it.

My plans for his succession feel more solid than ever. He’s even made— I think he and Romanoff might be friends. The notion pulls at the corners of my mouth, and I hope my read on them is correct. I hope she’s sincere with him. I still can’t believe he chose her, of all people, but maybe he didn’t choose her at all. It’s not like he and I chose each other. We happened. And I suppose he and Romanoff have happened, too.

The voices stop, and there’s a knock on my door, the firm slam of a strong man’s knuckles against metal.

“Come in,” I murmur.

The door opens and slides closed behind him.

He—

Oh my—

Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I can’t stop mouthing it. I think I’m even saying it.

Steve strides across the room and stops in front of my desk, smirking. “You like?”

I’m gaping. Again. “Wow.”

He regards himself, brushing his hands down his torso, over his hips, trailing off at his massive thighs. “Fits pretty good, huh?”

I’m on my feet. There’s nothing planful about it, an act of unconscious volition that I hitch my addled brain onto. He tracks my approach, shoulders rocking back, straightening like a cadet awaiting my inspection. The move pulls the fabric at the front tight over his torso, the ridges of it emulating the sculpted abdominal muscles I know lie just underneath. I have seen them. I have dreamed of touching them. Of licking them. Of watching my come travel in a slow, viscous trail through their valleys.

I rake my eyes up and down his body. I knew he was getting a new uniform, that he’d helped design it, but— I never, ever expected this. I’m not sure why. He designed his first uniform with the same kind of exquisite taste. But this, the construction of blue and gray, the subtle and few deep maroon accents, the lines and seams, it’s all familiar and entirely new, modern and retro. The perfection of it, of the fit on his body, shorts out most of my higher brain functioning. I can only marvel in the glory of him, the way a born-again might convulse and babble at the feet of Christ.

I trail my fingers down the right shoulder, over his SHIELD patch, over the reinforced pieces at his bicep and forearm. They’re stiff in comparison to the soft leather of the gloves, which is a stark contrast to the rough skin of the knuckles I feel as I poke through each of the holes punched to accommodate them. There’s a shift as he rotates his hand outward, angling for more.

“Don’t move.”

His eyes widen, but his hand drifts dutifully back into place. I brush my fingertips against his, feather-light, and I fight a writhing, almost unbearable sensation that jolts through me. It’s not pain, not a tickle. It’s like a whisper into an ear or a gentle hand passing through hair, one of those amorphous, ambiguously pleasurable feelings that pings in unexpected places — my wrist, my elbow, my stomach, my groin. His breath becomes audible through his nose.

I circle behind him, appraising him with a different kind of scrutiny than I would give my cadets, charged and decidedly unwholesome. He stiffens, and I wonder if he can feel me as I admire the smart leather of his shield harness, the taper of him that’s accentuated by the reinforcements at the shoulders. I flip open the compartments of his utility belt. There’s nothing in them, I’m not sure what he’d put in there, but that hardly seems the point. It’s hard to see any point, any logic in anything at all, when my attention falls lower.

His ass. God, his _ass_.

My lips part as I lay my hand over the right cheek and cup it gently. A sound edges out of the back of Steve’s throat as I rest my other hand on him and begin kneading, greedily.

“Secure office.”

Steve’s head jerks toward the windows as they fall dark. I listen for the click of the door.

My right hand drifts, sweeping the underside of his ass cheek, at the place it meets his thigh. I follow the curve inward, between his slightly parted legs. Steve lets out a weak huff as I drag my finger along the place behind his balls. I go slow, pulling my finger back toward me, and I know I’ve found his hole when a shudder vibrates through him. His breath starts coming open-mouthed, a little unsteady, and he slides his foot a few more inches out to make room for me.

“Is this it?” I whisper.

He gives a shaky nod.

I take my time, going back to his balls, feeling around them, drifting up to the hard base of his shaft and then back again. I press and ghost over his hole, listen for the sounds he makes, note all the places his breath catches, the kinds of touch that he likes best, the places that make him shift back against me. I store them all inside of me as I tease and retreat, nuzzling the side of his neck, breathing hot and open-mouthed against him, my lips grazing over his skin. I wrap my free arm around him, press my palm to the star at the center of his chest, and grind my cock slow and dirty against the thick muscle of him.

“This is a nice suit,” I murmur.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “I wanted you to like it.”

Did he? Did he think of me as he labored over his drawings? I saw him draw his first uniform, sketching and erasing, brow drawn, tongue peeking out of the corner of his mouth. He’d pause and ask me for input sometimes, even though I was barely verbal. God, I loved that. I love that about him. I love how easy he made it. How normal he made me feel. Just like he does now.

When I pull my hand away, I’m not ready for the whine that ekes out of him, for him to tilt his hips back in a silent request for more. But I resist him and continue my walk-around, noting the American flag, the small, almost unreadable name tape below it. I push my palm against my cock, just to take some of the mounting pressure off. When I come around, Steve’s eyes land on my hand, and one of his own twitches, even reaches, until I nod to it with my eyebrows raised. He gives a grunt of frustration and curls his fingers tight before relaxing them back at his side.

The corner of my mouth flinches, and my gaze meets his. God, I can barely breathe sometimes when I look at him, he is a masterwork of perfect angles, immaculately masculine save for the sensuous curve of his mouth. I brush my thumb over his lower lip, and there’s a shift of his jaw as he opens up wider, tongue touching the pad of my thumb, teeth bearing and grazing over it. It’s another shock that jolts through me, settling between my legs. I lay my hand on his cheek and cradle his face, hand drifting from my cock to his shoulder. I step closer and I’m leaning in, my mouth trailing along his jawline, I can still smell his shaving soap and—

He ducks his chin down and catches my mouth with his own.

I nearly drowned once when I was a kid, dragged away by a rip current on Long Island. I swam until I was exhausted, sinking and rising, choking on water, starving for the air. In my struggle, I unwittingly pushed my way to the edge of it, and when my feet touched sand again at last, I nearly cried as I pulled breath back into myself, as the oxygen lanced through my circulatory system and returned my life to me.

This is that feeling, a dire hunger for air, but my hunger is for him. For this. I’m not prepared for how utterly fucking terrifying it feels, for how dangerously overinflated my control feels. If I do this, if I keep doing this, I’ll—

I pull away. We stare at each other, startled, panting, wide-eyed. Steve’s pale, Irish skin is flushed all the way down his neck. I know it goes lower, but I didn’t think he would— not from just this. It feels secret and sublime to see him like this. And I want more. I want to make him blush and reel, I want to feel him moan in my mouth, feel his tongue against my own, and the thought of it hits harder than ten straight shots of tequila.

But I am afraid. I am so afraid.

It’s much easier just to drop down onto my knees, they were already starting to feel unsteady. His crotch is right there. It’s frankly a wonder that he hasn’t been pawing at it, with how awkwardly it’s positioned, huge and thick, pointed down toward his leg. I part the flap, find the vertical row of buttons, and undo them. It takes several movements of gentle contortion and both sets of our hands, Steve hissing, me apologizing, to finally ease it out. Most people don’t know that the Cap uniform is a jumpsuit, and this is the only way to do this without having him strip the whole thing off.

I’ve sucked a lot of dicks, I really have, but Steve’s is easily the biggest. I don’t even know what to do with it, at first. I’ve been told I’ve got a pretty big fucking mouth, but there’s no way I can take this thing even close to deep without asphyxiating.

“Sorry,” he murmurs.

I scoff off his apology. I’ve got one of these. I know what feels good. So I take him in my flesh hand and lick around the head. It drags a sigh out of him, and, emboldened, I suck him down as far as I can go, but my gag reflex is unusually responsive today, halting my efforts. At least it gives me a lot of spit to work with as I carve off a significant portion of my effort to not throw up all over him.

I feel his hands on my head then, urging me back. “Take it easy,” he says. “You really don’t have to...”

Oh, but I do. It’s either this, or I’m gonna do something batshit crazy. I might start kissing him, I might drag him to my couch, fall into his arms, urge his legs around me, and I think I’d lose it. Maybe for good. Everything I’ve worked for, all the careful architecture holding me up right now, holding my life, my death, would shatter. I don’t know what I’d do then. I don’t know what I would become then. I can’t risk it. I won’t.

I don’t give him an answer except to take his cockhead back into my mouth. I flirt with the undulating feeling of choking until his cock is wet enough with my spit for me to begin moving my hand along it with ease. So few men are uncut these days that I forget how functional the foreskin can be in matters like these.

He lets out a low groan, head dropping back. I find a rhythm that seems to please him, it’s all I want, this is all I want to be right now. And I take him in, my hand an extension of my mouth, licking him, sucking him down until I gag. For all his previous concerns, he can’t hide the sharp twitch of his cock every time it happens. When I’m confident that I’m not gonna puke, I get bolder, until he’s moaning, his hands on my head. He whispers, _yes, Bucky, yes_ , and how can I not keep this up?

But it takes fucking forever. I’m legitimately afraid my jaw might come unhinged right here and drop onto the floor. At least he gives me a warning before he comes, _I’m gonna… Oh God..._ , not that he needed to say anything at all. I’ve learned the sounds of him, his loud, huffing breaths, the way his whole body ripples and goes stiff. And, fortunately, there’s not a direct relationship between the amount of come he unloads into me and the size of him. I don’t know why I thought I might choke to death on that, too. What a death that would be.

When he’s done pulsing, I pull off him, panting, jaw shifting, feeling a perverse and profound sense of accomplishment. I barely register the feel of my own arousal through the ache in my face.

“Jesus,” Steve breathes. He catches a delayed dribble of come in his hand and gives me a dopey smile.

I return it, even though it hurts.

I crawl to my feet and stagger to my desk, where I have a small packet of Kleenex for things like this. He wipes off his hand, and when his dick has softened enough, he awkwardly stuffs it back into his suit.

I don’t fight him as he backs me into my desk, peels off his right glove, and fumbles around the buttons at my crotch with his quivering fingers. He pulls my cock out, spits in his palm, and jerks me hard and fast, my hands clutching his shoulders, unable to stop the sounds coming out of me as his touch overwhelms me. I can’t stop it. I can’t. Even when I fight for it, I’m gone, pulling him toward me, arms coming around his shoulders as I press my face against him and moan into his uniform.

I sag back against my desk, breath heaving in and out of me. He lifts his hand, looks to the pool of come cupped in his palm, and makes sure his eyes are on mine as he drags his tongue through it, lapping it up like an animal.

A shudder wracks through me. Who is this man? How can I keep learning him every day?

“We should do this more.” Steve swipes his hand over his thigh, a smile flitting on his mouth.

Truly, the only reason we don’t is because of my highly effortful avoidance of any situation that might be too sexy, too charged, too close. Sometimes, like today, I can’t seem to help myself. But it’s clear that I’m the problem here. I’m the only reason we aren’t fucking every day, why we aren’t sleeping together, why we aren’t kissing, cuddling, all of those pervasive desires we both secretly seem to have. Navigating this part of us feels like driving into oncoming traffic, swerving, honking, hands white-knuckled on the wheel, praying to make it through intact.

“I don’t know if we should,” I say quietly, easing my dick back in my pants.

His expression sours. “Why? I’m not asking to be your boyfriend. I just like this, and I know you do, too. You said we could be friends who do this.”

“I dunno. Maybe we can’t. Maybe we just need to be friends who are friends.”

He shakes his head in a slow, tired way. “Okay, whatever. Did I use that word right?”

I nod, frowning.

“You know what, it’s fine,” he continues, stooping to pick up his glove off the floor and fitting it back onto his large hand. “I’m tired of this fucking dance, anyway.”

“C’mon, I don’t want things to be shitty between us.”

“They don’t have to be shitty. I meant it when I said I could handle it. I just wish you wouldn’t offer things you won’t follow through with. Especially things like this. Maybe it doesn’t mean shit to you, but…”

“But what?”

I press my lips together. I want him to say it as badly as I don’t.

“I gotta go find Natasha,” Steve says, tossing his wadded up Kleenex into the garbage can. He throws a flip little wave over his shoulder. “See you later, pal.”

He pauses at the door. It doesn’t open for him. He slams his fist into the button on the side and glances back at me, dead-eyed, when nothing happens.

“Unsecure office,” I say.

The windows clear. The door opens. And then he’s gone.

—

True to his word, Steve is a fair sport in the wake of our decision — my decision — to stop fucking around. It wasn’t so long ago that this was the only life we knew, the only way we knew how to be friends, before I went and fucked it up. And while things don’t exactly feel easy between us, they feel stable enough that it’s ceased keeping me up all night. In the days after, we’ve dropped back into something like our old routine, even if the jokes are a little bit tense, our distance on the couch and at the table a little too wide for us. Even the old us.

But these problems seem insignificant on mornings like these, when the sun is breaking through the clouds, casting dim light on the Reflecting Pool. I’m greedy as I run next to him, it seems like a decent excuse to be close, and we both take it uncaringly, like an unspoken truce or a simple oversight. We can’t have that, so we let ourselves have this. If we pretend it’s normal, it becomes that.

“I hope I’m not a disappointment,” Steve says. He’s not winded in the slightest as he says it, and why would he be? We must be going at least eight miles per hour, a leisurely jog for him.

“To me?”

“Well, yeah. Of course that. But I meant the cadets.”

I’m packing him off tomorrow. There’s been some lively debate about what he should wear, whether he should show up in his new uniform — I insisted that he would be crazy not to, even as I worked to bat off a thick stirring of thunderous and confusing jealousy. He wondered whether he should bring his shield (of course). He’s wondered what he should say, whether he should give a straight reading of Howling Commandos history or speak thematically, not the what so much as the how, the why. That answer felt simple for me, but the inevitable conclusion seems to be filling him with angst.

I try not to sound as short of breath as I’m beginning to feel when I respond. “You won’t disappoint. You’re a celebrity to them.”

“That’s kind of what I’m afraid of. What if I don’t meet their expectations?”

I glance at him. Even though he’s hardly exerting himself, his shirt is still damp in patches between his pectorals and underneath his arms. Ease or not, he’s still a furnace of a man, and it takes an extraordinary physiological effort to keep his temperature regulated. I’m not quite furtive in my appreciation of it.

“It’s not your job to manage their expectations. And you get to decide who you’re going to be with them — Captain America or Steve. There’s no wrong way to do it.”

“I don’t know who Captain America is anymore. I thought I knew, but now…” Steve trails off with the minute shake of his head.

“You have plenty of time to figure it out. It’s a new chance to make him whatever you want him to be.”

His mouth flattens.

We’re coming around the corner where the short side of the Pool meets the long.

“Race you?” he says.

My stomach drops, a queasy sensation. I don’t want to race him. My legs feel heavy, my lungs inadequate. My body is fighting my every step, and I don’t want to make it more obvious than it already must be.

But I also can’t say no.

When we hit the stretch, I lock my jaw and break out into a dead sprint. I hear his Hey! of indignation and the swift thumping of his steps as he catches up. My chest burns but I push harder, a tightness constricts my stomach, my chest, my throat and— the world begins blurring in and out of focus, like the aftershock of a flashbulb, I catch the vague shape of Steve passing me, nausea rushing just as fast, and I slow— I slow and my legs—

I’m—

I—

“Bucky!”

My eyes crack open and Steve. It’s Austria. It’s him. He’s big. He’s scared. He’s patting my cheek.

“What?” I mumble. I flatten my hands on the… cement. I push up.

He pushes me back down.

“Hey, just take it easy. Are you okay?”

My head lolls to the side. There’s a woman standing a few feet away, her phone in hand.

“Do you want me to call 911?” she asks.

He glances over his shoulder at her. “Yeah, maybe—”

“No. I’m fine. No calls.”

Steve’s eyes land on mine. “You’re not fine.”

“Fucking— let me get up.”

Slowly, he draws his hands away and rests them on his knees. He thanks the woman but doesn’t shoo her off. I work myself upright, my head too full and too empty. I cough roughly, wetly, and press my bare forearm to my mouth. Just beyond my splayed feet is the sprawling, half-digested mess of my breakfast. I can still taste it in my mouth, acrid and vile.

The lady is still lollygagging around. A couple more people slow and ask if we need help. One of them is Updesh, looking unusually serious, thumb hovering over some button on his SHIELD phone that probably dispatches a Quinjet.

“I’m fine. Just—” I swipe my hand toward all of them. “Please.”

They trail away. Updesh casts a concerned glance behind him. God, this is fucking humiliating. I want to get up. I tell Steve. I issue a command to my legs, to my back, my hips, but nothing is cooperating. His brows gather, carving a deep line between them.

“Maybe you should just rest for a minute.”

“Get. Me. Up.” I growl.

I hate that I need him to do it. I hate how gracefully he rises to his feet, how easily he takes my hand in his and hoists me to mine. I stagger, one hand locked in his, the other gripping his shoulder for dear life.

His free hand comes around me. Presses against my back. Holds me. “You okay?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Are you sure you don’t need a doctor?”

“Let’s just go home.”

I let him scaffold my steps until we get back onto the lawn. The world orients gradually. My body starts to carry me fully. My steps fall sure beneath me. I pull away from him, move under my own steam, and his touch slips away.

“Maybe I should get a cab,” he says when we reach the street. He casts searching looks down the road, as if this were Manhattan, as if he could just throw up his giant arm and make one appear.

“It’s fine. I need to walk it off.”

He relents and falls quiet. I’m quiet. People stare at us, stare at me, and when I look down, I see why: there’s a thick trail of blood oozing from a nasty scrape on my right knee, snaking down my calf. My left knee is pink and angry. My right forearm begins to burn, and I turn it up to appraise the raw smear of skin and tiny bleeds. My palm is just as chewed up.

I sigh.

“Do you know what happened?” Steve asks.

I shrug. “I told you. I told you what’s been happening. You didn’t believe me.”

“It’s not that— I believed you. It’s just…”

And this is the place where reality collides with abstraction. It’s easy to tuck a seemingly healthy man into a bath, to feed him cheese cubes, to listen to and dismiss his woeful story of bodily degradation. It’s another to see that body start to degrade before your eyes.

“I’ll stay home with you,” he offers when we reach my building.

“I’m not staying home for this. I’ll just throw a bandaid on it, it’ll be fine. I’ve got shit to do. You’ve got shit to do. Tony wants to see you.”

“I know. We’re gonna talk later today.”

I raise an eyebrow and start ascending the stairs. “Oh, you guys pals now?”

It’s the first true amusement I’ve felt today. I can’t imagine them getting along, no matter how badly I’d like them to.

Steve lets out a little snort. “I don’t know about pals, but he got my number somehow.”

“I might have given it to him. I hope that’s okay.”

“Sure.”

Back in the apartment, Steve tries to follow me into the bathroom with offers to help me, as if I haven’t been dressing my own wounds since 1943. I try not to sound like too big of a dick as I reject him, but I largely fail.

Still, he lingers outside the door, as if he’s waiting for me to hit the floor again.

“The cadets could use a lesson on what duty really means,” I say, suppressing a hiss as I drag an alcohol-soaked swab over the ugly gash on my knee.

“And what’s that?”

“They all think about duty as just service to the organization. The mission.”

When Steve makes a small _hmph_ , I know he gets where I’m going. We’ve both seen ideologies rise and crumble, monolithic and immovable until the bullets begin to fly, until lives are at risk, the lives of your friends, the men and women to your left and right. Sometimes the mission becomes them. Getting them out alive. Fuck the cause. Fuck the long game. There’s no reliable calculation for when you favor life over cause; you can only live it, decide it, in those moments. When one of your men gets shot in the thigh, sometimes you let the enemy hold ground if it means extracting him safely. When your best friend falls off a train, sometimes you don’t bother hunting down his body. Sometimes you drive forward. Get the bad guy. Not many can play both the odds and the emotions just right all the time. War is a very human endeavor.

“Maybe you should give the talk instead,” Steve says, and I realize I’ve been babbling some version of this aloud between cleanings and bandagings.

“You can do it just fine. They need to hear it from you. You’ve made the calls. You’ve done the math. They’ll have to do it, too. Someday.”

“Can I come in?”

I let my foot drop from the counter back onto the floor and begin scooping up the wrappers I’ve strewn about. “Sure.”

He enters, awkward and sheepish. He looks me up and down with a dim nod of approval.

I raise a brow. “Did you need something?”

He shakes his head, but he’s lying. I feel an urgent compulsion to call him out on it, coupled with a counterstrike of resistance. I don’t think I can handle what he wants. He wants big things. He always has. He wants things I can’t afford to give him.

He offers a weak smile. “Guess I should get ready for work.”

“Yeah.” I open the cupboard below the sink and drop the wadded wrappers into the trash. “Guess you should.”

I brush past him on the way out, breathing a sigh of stark, terrible relief.

—

I curse as yet another call to Tony goes to voicemail. I’m standing in the empty conference room, the chairs still ajar, pushed away from the table, the trash can stuffed with the remains of their catered lunches. I meant to be here, but I dropped down on my couch to rest my eyes and woke up nearly two hours later, flailing and disoriented, hand landing on the sidearm strapped to my thigh, blinking and utterly disbelieving when I checked my clock and my watch. I guess I didn’t realize how draining the morning was. How draining profound humiliation can be.

I dial Steve. He doesn’t answer, either. Not his personal phone, not the new work phone.

I need to at least attempt to show a little restraint before leaping to the top of the food chain with stupid questions, even if it means calling _her_. She picks up after two rings.

“Romanoff.”

“Hey, were you in the Stark briefing?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Did you see where Tony went off to? He’s not answering my calls.”

“He and Steve went to the eighth floor.”

I frown. “Why the eighth floor?”

“No idea.” There’s a dim clicking in the background, like the sound of a turn signal. “They tried to wait for you.”

“I got caught up with something. How was it?”

“Not as excruciating as I thought it would be.”

I begin pacing a loose track around the table, fingers brushing the backs of every chair I pass. “You guys gonna train later?”

“You might say that. We’re gonna get a couple drinks. Play a little cat and mouse.”

The image is entertaining, Romanoff and Steve in casual clothes, casing a place, whispering observations, chiding Steve for being his usual, unsubtle self.

“Good,” I reply. “Just get him home before midnight. He’s got an early flight tomorrow.”

“Sure thing, Dad.”

“Oh, shut up,” I mutter.

“Does Stark usually carry around a metal briefcase handcuffed to his wrist?”

I stop dead in my tracks. “Why?”

“You might wanna head to the eighth floor.”

“Okay. I gotta go.”

I hang up before she can give a response, and I’m out the door, jogging to the stairwell. Possibilities rush to me, and I piece through fragments of one very bad idea that I don’t let come to full fruition before leaping to the next. I burst through onto the medical floor and blow through the clear doors that part for me. I stop a white coat and ask about Stark, and she points me to the lab.

I’m frantic as I race past the blood draw stations, utterly brainless as I pull open every closed curtain I pass, earning more than a few looks of confusion and insult. I catch the burbling cadence of Tony’s voice and run to it, past two loitering security forces guys chuckling about something, I feel their attention hard at my back.

I grab a fistful of fabric and yank.

The phlebotomist cranks his head around. He’s holding a rapidly filling vial of blood rushing from a fat vein in Steve Rogers’ arm.

My eyes feel wild as they land on Steve’s. “What the fuck are you doing?”

His mouth hinges open, but he doesn’t say anything. We both look to Tony, to the open metal suitcase where five full vials are nested.

“Oh, hey. Missed you at the briefing.” A tension gathers in Tony’s jaw that belies the casual ease of his words.

“What the _fuck_? What the fuck are you doing?”

“Look,” Steve says, “we’re just—”

“Just what? Giving him your blood? To take back to New York?”

“Well, I’m gonna drop it in Boston, actually,” Tony says, defiantly nonchalant.

I’m not sure who to yell at first. My fists clench as rage fills me, the kind lanced through with terror. The most dangerous kind.

“You know what this shit is worth?” I snarl at Steve. “Do you?”

“I just wanna see if it could help,” he says weakly.

“Help with what? Don’t you see how pointless this is? How fucking dangerous?”

I wheel toward Tony and jab a finger at him. “And _you,_ you fucking know better. Traveling with this shit. You aiming for another Stark family ‘accident’?”

He glares back. I can pull low blows, too, he doesn’t even fucking know. “You can just stop right there.”

“No! I don’t care how many fucking goons you have. You really think a couple meatheads are gonna help when they shoot down your fucking plane and cut this off your charred fucking corpse?”

“They?” His mouth curls into a sour shape. “They who?”

“Bucky, please—”

“Why won’t you just stop?” I’m screaming at both of them, I can’t decide which one I fucking hate more right now. “Why won’t you people just stop? Why won’t you accept reality? Why don’t you fucking believe me? I feel like I’m going crazy. Why does everyone keep saying the sky is fucking green? It’s blue! It’s fucking blue! I’m not a fucking idiot, and I’m not gonna have you—”

“Is there a problem here?”

I turn sharply on my heels. It’s the two goons in their dumb-fuck berets, hands twitching toward their weapons. I don’t know which one said it, so I talk to the smaller one, the one who looks stupid enough to get in my fucking shit right now.

“Get the fuck away from me,” I hiss. “I will snap your fucking neck.”

His hand clamps over his pistol, but I’m faster. I draw. He freezes, mouth gaping like he’s actively shitting himself. Good. He should be. But the other one is made of stronger stuff, sidearm raised, muzzle trained on me.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Steve says. I hear his feet land on the floor, the click of something, possibly the needle, the vial of freshest blood, dropping onto the counter. I feel him move in, then the fucker steps right in front of me, holding his arms wide, forming a barrier between me and the goons. He’s so close that the muzzle of my pistol nearly brushes against his back.

“Get the fuck out of the way,” I growl.

“No. Let’s all just stop. Let’s all calm down.”

Over Steve’s shoulder, I catch sight of a whole fire team of security forces lining up outside the room. A couple already have their aims locked on my head, Steve’s head, and the others exchange confused looks but follow suit, slow and uncertain. Unsteady. I grit my teeth.These _fuckers_. I could kick Steve’s legs out from under him, knock him off balance, toss him to the side. I could whip the nearby stool at the guy closest to me. A diversion. Confusion. I could crack off seven shots. Drop them like bricks. None of them can out-trigger the reflexes Tony gave me.

“Bucky…” Steve murmurs. “Please.”

But I can’t do it. I won’t. I won’t let Steve see the thing I am just below the person he thinks he knows.

“Dump it,” I say, gripping my pistol tighter but keeping my trigger finger very loose. My mind calculates and re-calculates. “All of it.”

There’s a shuffling of steps, the clang of metal on metal. I listen for five almost inaudible slips of rubber against glass, the thick slosh of blood hitting the sink on the back wall. The sixth vial is snapped out of the transfer device and dumped, too.

“He’s dumping it,” Steve says, craning his head around and presumably watching Tony. He nods toward him. “See?”

No, I’m not gonna see. I’m not falling for that fucking trick. “Turn on the water.”

Tony sighs. But he does it.

“Okay, Barnes. It’s all gone. Now, let’s all just— calm down.”

I imagine him making some gesture, one that makes the security team waiver. The cool ones start to lower their weapons; the terrified ones clutch them tighter. They’re waiting for me.

I swallow hard. Slowly, painfully slowly, I lower my arm. But if they think I’m gonna lay my weapon on the floor, kick it over to them, they’re fucking high. I slide it back into the holster and secure it.

“What the hell is going on here?”

Hill. Fuck. Fuck me.

Her eyes are sharp as she appraises the goons. As they land on Steve, on me. I don’t miss the reflexive brush of her fingers over her own weapon.

“Is there a problem?” she asks me.

I shake my head.

Her brows draw in closer as she scrutinizes me.

“I’m fine,” I mouth. It’s all I can manage. “I’m fine.”

She stares for a few moments longer, then waves her arms at the security. “All right, get out of here.”

A blanket of exhaustion settles on me as they retreat. As my adrenaline washes out of me. As my sweat begins to cool. It’s only then that I turn around. To Tony’s disappointment. To the phlebotomist balled up in the corner, whimpering, hands gathered over the crown of his head.

God damn it.

I pad to the sink and look inside. I run the water again, just for good measure, cupping handfuls of it and tossing it against the sides of the stainless steel. Then I turn it off and brace myself against the edge of the counter.

“Just stop,” I whisper. “Please.”

“Okay,” Steve says. “We’ll stop.”

“You know that was probably our last shot,” Tony murmurs.

“I don’t care. It’s not worth it.”

I hope they both hear what I can’t bring myself to say — that I would rather die than risk them, than risk more of us happening to this world. This is one of those places where you let the man go. Where ideology wins. This is the math. It’s incontrovertible. It is sound.

There’s a thick sigh then. Tony’s. “I’m gonna go.”

I nod.

He helps the trembling phlebotomist to his feet and guides him out of the room by the arm. He won’t look at me. Neither of them will.

And then we’re alone.

Steve draws the curtain closed. He lays his hands on my shoulders. He squeezes them, gently.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I just want to help you.”

“I know. But you can’t do this shit. You just can’t. You can’t risk it.”

“Okay. I won’t. There’s gotta be something else to try.”

My eyes squeeze closed. I want to cry. I want to cry and I want to scream. But I know he won’t hear me, even then. He can’t. This is Steve. He doesn’t know how to stop. How to rest. How to let me rest.

My head droops.

He pulls me into his arms. And I am quiet.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

_Wish me luck!_

His talk is this afternoon. I think of him on Friday night, after he wore himself out asking if I was okay, was I sure, what could he do, just tell me, please. _Please_. He asked me until I snapped, told him to fucking leave me alone, regretting it the instant my voice hit my ears. He sighed and stalked to the couch, then leaned over the coffee table and made halting notes on the 3x5 cards we picked up at CVS on our way home. I couldn’t stay at work after the shit show in the lab, and this time I didn’t reject Steve’s offer to be with me. I let him drive. He didn’t even do a terrible job, despite not having a license, despite not driving for an age. He stayed with me, cancelling his spy date with Romanoff to field an evening’s worth of my prickly refusals. I watched him from the stool on the island, drinking the hot mug of camomile tea he brewed for me. He hardly asked for any of my input at all. He seemed to know his own mind in furious spates punctuated with crawling lulls that had him chewing his pen, his blond brows drawn. I could only admire him, distantly, with simmering shame and fondness.

_You won’t need luck. Just be honest_

_I’m always honest. LOL._

I smile.

_Did I use that right?_

This is still the way of many of his adoptions of modern language — technically correct but just a few ticks off. I can’t determine whether he’s really still trying to figure it out or if this is all part of some deeply entertaining ruse.

_Yes :)_

A long sigh draws out of me and diffuses over the wide space of my apartment. It’s strange to be home at dawn on a Monday and not be getting ready for work. Fury responded with a “yeah, I think that’s probably a good idea,” after I asked for the week off. No doubt word of my meltdown has rippled through the organization: there goes Barnes, I told you he was fucking crazy, oh did you hear we got a visit from the Winter Soldier last week?

I could have left on better terms. But I have to seize the opportunity given to me, the confluence of Steve’s absence with a disturbing demonstration of how things might be from now on — me flailing pathetically for my lost control, my body betraying me, my emotional stability crumbling. Harding’s words come to me again, as they’ve been so often revisiting me: Sometimes you have to know when to stop. When to let go.

This is as good of a time as any, if there is ever a good time for such things. While I still have a modicum of agency. While I have a week of free air to breathe without the complication that is Steve Rogers. I’ve learned to recognize moments like these when they arise. When crisis is mounting, buckling me, threatening to collapse me, sometimes it happens, the haze of desperation parts like it was thrown open by God himself, and a path spreads wide, an escape hatch, and you can either stand and watch as the road fogs over again or square your shoulders against your terror and take a step forward.

And there is a path now. I found it late Friday night, Steve sleeping downstairs, his breath woven into Chopin like a duet, as far away from me as Chopin himself. And something about that distance felt right, comfortable, better for both of us, probably. He needs space to move forward and I need space to go, and I thought of what going might mean, it sure as hell won’t be me in some hospital bed, wheezing and weak and helpless. But maybe it could be somewhere beautiful, somewhere quiet. Maybe I could make my own way, and why not? Why stop now?

It was a curious thought, and then it became an exciting one. And when I sent him upstate, it became inescapable.

I wander past the couch, the wood chest I bought for his bedding. It’s strange how easily I’ve gotten so used to his presence in my home, how bitter his absence feels. I expect to hear him shuffling around in the kitchen, banging around in the bathroom, bustling about the utility closet. Sometimes I unconsciously strain for the small sounds he makes, like when he’s on the couch, just breathing. Reading. Thinking. Pretending to nap when he intuits that I want some alone time.

I imagine him here, after. Appraising the space, deciding what to keep, what to chuck, what to replace. Will he keep the art? Will he read any of my books? Will he hoard and cook old food now that he can’t get sick from it, with no curmudgeonly old man to boss him around and regulate his routine?

My mouth flattens. I really need to get going. I need to push this machine into motion. And so I wander around and pick up. I straighten the magazines on the coffee table. I empty the dishwasher. I throw the half-hamper of dirty clothes and my sheets into the wash and head to the store as the cycle runs. I buy his favorite things — a box of Hershey bars, bags of chips and jars of salsas, five packs of frozen chicken breasts and two different kinds of Mrs. Dash. I sneak in some provisions for myself — two handfuls of beef jerky, a big bag of trail mix, a gallon of water.

Back home, I toss my clothes in the dryer and clean out the fridge one last time, then I pull my big go-bag from the back of the closet and drop my food and water into it. My movements are all rote, curiously devoid of emotion, my mind free from everything except the most practical of thoughts. Even as I settle at the island and start writing, I find almost any feeling too distant, too ephemeral, to hold.

I write the first one for Peggy. I’m pretty sure she will understand, better than any of them. She’s always known more about this than I could put to words. I thank her for saving me, for being a good friend. I wish her the best on her own journey, even as I frown at the humiliating places I know it will take her. I also thank Fury for being a good boss, for giving me the chance that nobody else would have been bold enough to take. It’s riddled with apologies for my bad behavior, my insubordination, my pigheadedness. I jot a note to Harding, apologize more, wish her a fruitful career, remind her of her talents and goodness, express my hopes for her. I’ve arranged for Agent Ivers to mentor her, she’s good, she will help you get where you need to go, I say. I tell her to track down Steve’s lecture, surely she can find it in one of our archives. He will say what needs to be said, more eloquently, more heartfelt, than I could, and I want her to hear it. I tell her she can rely on him, that he will help her if she ever needs it. I think I can speak on his behalf here; he’s just that kind of man, and I know it. I know him.

It all flows out of me, the task so much easier than I thought it would be. I don’t pause to wonder what this might mean. Instead, I stuff the envelopes and print names on the front. Done. Done. Done.

But when I get to Steve’s, I find most of my words and my ease departed. What do I say? I want to think that he knows me, too, that some part of him will understand this. I don’t think I have to paint the whole picture for him, trace that damning line through my reality to its inevitable conclusion. Because he’s not stupid. Not intellectually, anyway.

_Steve,_

My pen halts. I coach myself forward: this is your best friend, he gets you, don’t be such a fucking coward. I spent a lot of last night trying to find the right way to put it, but it all sounded trite, cheesy, like if Hallmark made a suicide note.

_I’m sorry. I hope you can understand this. I think you will. I hope to god you will._

_The apartment is yours. Most of my assets are, too. Don’t blow it all on socks and chocolate._

_And Steve, you can be Captain America. You ARE Captain America, more than I ever could hope to be. And you can make him anything. Truly. This world holds no limits for you. You are free. You can be happy. I only want you to be happy. And I’m sorry that I was so stupid to think you weren’t ready for this world, because you are. You can handle anything. Including this. I know you can. It’s who you are._

_Please just make sure you don’t kill my orchids or I’ll be pissed. I’ve left instructions. The number for my lawyer is below._

_Love always,_

_Bucky_

I don’t read it again. This isn’t something you analyze, something you redact pieces out of, write and rewrite. This is all going to be jarring enough, and I don’t need to also leave a pile of scrapped letters in the trash for him to find. I shove it in the envelope, write his name in all caps, and lay all the letters in a neat, unmissable stack on the countertop.

It’s not until I get to my orchids that I feel a thick sensation crawling up the back of my throat. Ten years. I’ve been tending them, fretting over them, talking to them, playing music for them, for ten years. I’ve heard that they can live for a hundred, if you take good care of them. I need him to take good care of them. It feels important to leave something alive for him. Maybe they will keep his company the way they always have kept mine.

There are upper limits to how much you can abuse them with water and food and still keep them alive. If I skirt just to the edge of those limits, they should survive until he gets back. I scrawl notes for each one of them — how many drops they take, how much and when to water them, how you know they need more light or less. They all have different personalities, different preferences, quirks and patterns. At least, I think they do.

I have to trust him with this. But I always have, haven’t I? I have always wanted him close, stubborn and reliable, even in his tumult. I know all of his quirks and patterns, too. I have always adored them, even the ugly ones. I think I have always adored him.

I feel suddenly heavy, too heavy for my skeleton to bear, and I lean into the strong granite beneath my hands. I should have hugged him before he got on the plane, fuck everyone in the hangar and what they might think of us, what they might name us on their coffee breaks. I should have smiled more. I should have taken him to a diner early Saturday morning and had a last meal with him, one I knew in my heart was our last. The night before he left, I should have pulled him up to my loft and pulled him into my bed. I should have kissed him. I should have held him. I should have let him hold me. I should have let myself take something from him, just a little thing. Just one last thing.

But I suppose that would have just made it all worse. For Steve, anyway. I need to abdicate any right to him now, any right to wanting anything except my own carefully choreographed end.

I gather up my bag, don my shoulder holster and transfer my pistol to it, and make a last minute stop at my bookshelf. I pull Emerson and Thoreau, these seem like the men you take into this kind of wilderness.

I feel a preternatural sense of calm as I regard my apartment for one last time. We’ve been through a lot together, me and this place. But it’ll be in good hands. Steve will enjoy it here, or he’ll sell it and find somewhere else to carry on. I know he will. It’s the thing he does best.

And so— I’m okay. I’m okay with this. I’m okay with all of this.

I throw on my coat. And I say goodbye.

—

I don’t know what special kind of insanity makes a man voluntarily drive in Manhattan, but I’m finding out now. My trip to Stark Tower was a full bust. The front desk said, apologetically, that Tony wasn’t around, but I’m pretty sure he’s just mad at me for Friday. He hasn’t been shy about sending my calls to voicemail. So much for the wining and dining he owes me. I didn’t call Pepper to run interception, because this is also easier, I guess. It would be hard to say farewell without actually saying it; he’d know something was up, and Tony’s not good at this stuff. I might have gotten emotional.

And so I picked up a booklet of stamps from the bodega and wrote him a note, an improvised series of sentences loosely threaded together with my appreciation: _You’re a good man. Please never stop being weird. Thank you for being my good friend. Thank you for trying to save me. Don’t fuck things up with Pepper. She’s a good one. Don’t let the good ones go._

I’ll toss it in the mail when I get upstate. That should buy me some time before it gets to him. Though, who am I kidding — he hates the mail. He might read it in a month.

My one consolation for coming to the city is that the car now smells incredible. I made a stop at the 2nd Avenue Deli, good lord, it’s been so long since I was last there. I couldn’t decide what I wanted, so I got two servings of almost everything. They were so pleased to see me, as if I belonged there. They greeted me by name, but it didn’t feel performative or pandering. I was one of them. I forget sometimes that I always have been, that I can make little gefilte remarks — is it the good kind or the sweet, shitty kind? — and be understood. They see me as the Litwak I am, no matter how Irish my father was. This delightful, inborn sense of community is a fleeting one, though. Pretty sure people who off themselves aren’t welcome in the afterlife, whatever afterlife there may be. The Catholics said one thing, the Jews barely spoke of it. I once found the idea of a heaven comforting, but now, with so many marks stacked against me, it’s more reassuring to just pretend it’s all bullshit.

The traffic gets better after I cross the Willis Avenue Bridge, but only by a little. Even after so many visits, I still can’t tell if I think Westchester is a shithole or not. But it’s where _Mame_ and Dad moved in ‘57, where Rebecca planted her roots, where she carved out her nice life with her Jewish husband and her two kids. She did all the right things, just the way _Mame_ wanted her to. She always was the good child.

I pull into one of the visitor spots at the home and slide my rental into park. I always have to stop here, gather my wits, my emotional fortitude, brace for the barrage of shouts and babbles, brace myself against the very real possibility that she might not know who I am. Or worse, she will know and be terrified.

I grab the food from the passenger seat and get out. There are a few residents hobbling and rolling around the grounds, some attended closely, others only distantly. I suppose it’s as nice a place as any to be on a locked memory care ward. We got her into a good one, whatever kind of place — what kind of medical prison — could be constituted as “good.”

The nurses at the station also greet me by name. One of them points to the flier taped to the desk:

_Shanah Tovah! Come celebrate Rosh Hashanah with us! Wednesday September 19_ from _11:00 to 1:00 Dining Room Family and Friends Welcome and Encouraged!_

“Gonna be a lot of fun,” she tells me. “You should come.”

“I can’t, unfortunately. Work.”

“That’s too bad.”

Yes, it is. This is yet another thing I would definitely not get into some imaginary heaven for — doing this during the high holidays.

I drum my fingers on the desk. “Is there like a… donation I could make or something?”

She loudly asks one of the other women if Mr. Barnes can make a donation. They debate back and forth about who would handle it, and no, I don’t have my checkbook on me, that would be easier, we all agree.

“I’m gonna go see her,” I say, pointing in the general direction of her room. “I’ll stop back on my way out and we can sort it then.”

“Okay.” She smiles at me. “She’s doing pretty good today.”

We’ve developed a shorthand around good and bad, one that has shifted slowly over the years. Currently, ‘good’ means up and about, in good spirits. It mentions nothing about her level of lucidity or organization, both of which are highly transient and open to interpretation.

I thank her for the heads up, then I charge down the hall toward her room, plastic bag swinging at my leg. I’ve learned that faster is better so that the undulating voices and cries and moans blend into a single cacophony that feels somehow easier to manage.

Her door is open, but I knock against the jamb anyway. “Rebecca.”

I step inside and crane my head around. She’s bustling about at the vanity and turns, orienting to me as swiftly as a 91-year-old woman can. Her eyes go bright when they land on me, and I think, breathlessly, that she might know who I am.

“Oh hi!” she says.

“Hey. How are things?”

One of those voices breaks free from the din, a woman, moaning, _oh, oh no, no, get away from me, get it away, no, no—_

I swing the door closed. Enough of that shit.

“That woman is always moaning,” Rebecca says, exasperated. “I live with a bunch of crazy people.”

My laugh is an anxious one. “Did you eat yet?”

She freezes and becomes thoughtful, or possibly confused. It’s difficult to say which side this familiar expression falls on.

I don’t let her struggle too long with it. I hold up the bag. “I brought something for us.”

She shuffles toward me, a dreamy smile curving her mouth. They still help her with her lipstick every day. In fact, she still looks quite good, her body remarkably unburdened to the degree her mind is.

“Oh, I love that smell,” she says.

Of course she does. This is the smell of our home.

I pull the rolling table up to the edge of the bed and set all the containers out on it — entrees, assortments of appetizers, a sealed container of matzoh ball soup, an immense grilled pastrami sandwich wrapped in butcher’s paper, a small bag of sweets.

When I turn, she’s back at the mirror, passing a brush through her hair, like I never arrived. There’s no urgency to it at all, and I debate between shepherding her over and letting her do this for as long as she might. I’ve seen her brush the same overly-thinned patch of hair for 20 minutes straight, smiling to herself.

I check my watch, lips pursing, and move to her. Her eyes meet mine in the mirror, and I lay my right hand on her shoulder, gently tugging.

“C’mon, let’s eat some lunch.”

“Oh, okay.”

She lets herself be guided to the table, where she looks over the containers like a child mooning over a spread of gifts. She starts to pry open one of the entree containers, her hairbrush still in hand. I coax it from her grip.

“I hope it’s not more chicken,” she grumbles.

I work open all the containers. “Well, I think there’s some chicken in here, but…”

Her arbitrary concerns about chicken seem to evaporate when she lays eyes on it all. She’s smiling. When she smiles like this, when she’s content with me, whoever she thinks I am, when I can do something meaningful for her, I smile, too.

But I feel mine starting to fade as my attention fixates on a brownish stain on the front of her blouse. Maybe she already ate lunch. Maybe that’s from breakfast. But whatever it is, I scowl. I fucking hate seeing her dirty.

She’s already diving into the coleslaw, pinching shredded cabbage between her fingers. I take her carefully by the wrist and guide her hand away. “Wait, wait, honey. Let’s get you a new shirt first.”

Rebecca looks to the place where my hand curls around her, and her breath catches, head tilting. And this is the part where she will either be enchanted or horrified.

Her fingertips are freezing as she brushes them over the plating that makes my knuckles. “So pretty. Is this silver?”

I loosen my hold and spread my hand wide, allow her to take it between her own, flip it, squeeze it, whatever she wants. “No, it’s special metal. Very special.”

“Did you make it?”

“My friend did.”

“It’s beautiful.” She touches it so carefully, like it’s part of me. Like it is me. There are no questions; she simply accepts it.

“Okay,” I murmur, “let’s get you changed, and then we’ll eat.”

Rebecca lets go of me. “Why?”

“You’ve got schmutz.” I gesture to my own clean shirt, just above my right pectoral.

She inspects herself as I walk to her small closet and start digging through it. I pull two tops and present them. “Do you want this one? Or this one?”

She sneers. “I don’t like those.”

I pull another pair, one with a flower print, the other baby blue. “What about these?”

“I want the one with the flowers,” she demands.

“This one?”

“No, _that_ one. With the other flowers.”

I sigh and look for something, anything else, with flowers. She lets me know when I’ve found it — a frankly ugly print smeared with rabbits.

“This?”

“That’s my favorite.”

Ugh. I bet Dan’s wife picked it out.

I get the dirty shirt pulled over her head but, of course, she’s decided to undo her bra, too, the fabric parting at the center of her chest, everything falling out. I try to let her stuff herself back in, but my discomfort with watching her fail is greater than the discomfort of just helping. It’s a small mercy that she’s not fighting me, at least.

She doesn’t have a large appetite, but she still seems to have an adventurous one. She tries a little bit of almost everything, only finding the p’tcha distasteful. Oh well, I say, more for me. I have a deep hunger for all of it, gorging myself while maintaining a steady line of questions about carefully neutral things — what she does every day, who her friends are, whether the kids come to visit. Rebecca gives a range of responses, some sensical, some not. It’s all fine with me, so long as she’s happy.

After I’ve cleaned up, I pull the two armchairs together and grab the photo album from inside her night stand. This is the real test, it always is. She seems to remember most when we do this. Whoever’s visiting, I bet we all tell ourselves it’s just for her, but when we do things like this, it’s almost always for us, too.

There’s one thing I’m most concerned with, selfishly. I’m so consumed by it that I barely attend to the pictures of _Mame_ and Dad, of Dad’s family, _Mame_ ’s own conspicuously absent. My parents were nice looking people, my dad just plain goddamn nice, my _mame_ brave and fiercely in love with her children. We had it so good.

I flip the pages until I find a picture of me, maybe around eighteen, a shit-eating grin, still a little baby fat on my cheeks. Not quite yet handsome, but very close. I have to set the album on the chair and retrieve her from the mirror, where she’s using her fingers to brush through her hair now, brushing and brushing. God, maybe I should just fucking leave her to it, it’s what she wants, isn’t it? She doesn’t seem to know me from the orderly who brings all her other food.

I watch, hands twitching. I could go, it would be okay. She wouldn’t miss me, I’d be like a flicker of light out of the corner of her eye. A ghost, at best.

But I want this. And if I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, well, might as well go out in a hail of selfishness.

She doesn’t seem particularly bothered when I guide her over and sit her down in one of the chairs. She’s still got a surprisingly good grip.

“Do you know who that is?” I ask, spreading the photo album between us and pointing to my stupid 18-year-old face.

“That’s Baruch.”

“Yeah, wow. Yeah.” My God, it’s been years — years — since anyone called me that. Usually he’s Bucky or, more rarely, James. It’s such a shock to hear that it distracts me from the fact that she doesn't seem to recognize that he is me.

I still give a mandatory prompt. “And who’s he?”

“My brother.”

Her mouth twitches. Her eyes crinkle. She sees him, knows him. She does not give me that look. It’s so silly to be disappointed, but I’m a fool. This entire day has been a true proof of that.

“What’s he like?” I press.

She points to a picture of _Mame_ looking more severe than she actually was. “She cried so much,” Rebecca says, woefully.

She doesn’t need to finish the rest of the sentence, which goes something like _because of him_. He’s the one who made her cry.

Rebecca’s nobbed fingers flick at the pages until she lands on a picture of the two of us at the beach, me probably nearly my drafting age, a little more roguish and solid; Rebecca looking like she’d rather be anywhere except at the beach with her brother.

“He made me go in the water,” she says, jabbing her finger into that man’s face. “He nearly drowned but he made me go in anyway. He made me swim. And all my girlfriends watched him.”

She sounds almost resentful, poking at the photo. But then she laughs so hard that I flinch from the force of it. “He stole all the beauty, but I got all the brains!”

I smile, even as I shake my head. She did get all the brains, decidedly. But she was also beautiful — wavy, fair hair like _Mame_ , a regal jawline, straight teeth. A solid constitution, a firm sense of self that I could only envy.

“Would you believe me if I said I was Baruch?” I say, too softly at first. I repeat it so she can hear.

She waves a dismissive hand to the room. “Oh, no. He got shot.”

I feel my eyebrow rise. “He got _shot_?”

“I need to find it.”

After a couple of tries, she pushes herself out of her chair. She turns in a way that seems aimless, until she spots her dresser and moves toward it, her thick-soled shoes scuffing on the floor. She opens the top drawer and paws through small items of clothing, muttering to herself. She tries to bend over, reaching for the bottom drawer, and I leap to my feet and crouch down to help.

“What are we looking for?” I ask.

She points. It’s right there, resting on a pile of papers — a tri-folded American flag in a clear case. Rebecca reaches for it, and I regard it for a few dumbstruck moments before letting her take it from me.

“This was his.” She brushes over it with the side of her hand, as if covered in a film of dust that only she can see.

I wonder if that’s the original, the one laid on my empty coffin before it was ceremoniously folded and laid in my _mame_ ’s hands. It’s an exchange I hate imagining, a firstborn for a piece of cloth.

“Who do you think I am?” I ask.

Her head tilts, quizzical and slow. “Are you my son?”

“No. That’s Daniel. I’m James.”

She accepts this news impassively, then hands the flag back to me like it’s a used paper plate. There’s shuffling again as she moves to her vanity and combs her fingers through her hair again. I lay the flag back in the drawer and close it, rising to my feet.

“I need to go to the beauty salon,” she says. “Can you take me?”

I pick up the hairbrush from her bed and take her by the wrist, easing it into her hand. “I’m not sure.”

There’s a soft knock at the door. A woman pokes her head in with my sister’s name on her lips before spotting me. She smiles to Rebecca.

“Oh, who’s this?” I guess they also conduct their little tests.

Rebecca looks at me. When she smiles, she’s radiant. “This is my friend. My dear friend.”

And that’s the best I could want, really. To have her look upon me with positive regard. To remember her brother with fondness. At least she, like the rest of my family, will not have to grieve me twice.

She and the nurse exchange some small talk. I check my watch. For the first time in years, I really don’t want to go.

But I have a long drive ahead of me.

I don’t draw out my goodbye, but I do try to make it good. I kiss her cheek. Call her ‘sweetheart’ and I tell her I love her. She parrots most of it back, and I’m not sure if she means it. But that’s okay.

On my way out, I stop by the front desk and bitch about her dirty shirt, then make a $3,000 donation with a request for anonymity.

I’m blinking hard as I walk to the car.

—

_George Edward Barnes_

_1893 — 1969_

_Beila Sofer Barnes_

_1898 — 1990_

Such a long time without him.

I wish she had remarried. It’s not like she wasn’t resilient enough, adaptive enough, to move on. This is the woman who ran away from her shtetl at 16, grifted as a gentile with a borrowed name to get a job as a caretaker, and married a very nice Catholic. This is the woman who stole her mother’s challah cover and ran, wove herself in with the Poles and Russians, never quite one of them, never quite one of her own. She fought a body that only allowed her two live children, one lost to war and vanity and confusion, the other relegated to a slow, piteous death while still walking the world.

I don’t know what to say now. I don’t think these people would know me. I’m grateful, at least, that they died thinking I was a hero. That my _mame_ would never know the full disappointment of having a son who, even after a full reformation, refused to be the man she wanted.

I apologize. It feels like I’m apologizing to a dream.

But still, I kneel. I press my hands to the earth and imagine their bodies below. I wonder what they look like, if they are only shifted bones now. I didn’t make plans for my own bones. Maybe I should have.

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

My fingers press into the ground. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in signs. I don’t believe in angels or ghosts. I suppose this silence is my answer.

That silence breaks when my phone starts jingling, startling me out of my haze.

Steve. It’s Steve. It’s Steve, and I should let it go to voicemail. I should make sure this is clean. I should—

But I press the receive button.

“Hey!” he greets.

“How’d it go?”

“Good, I think. I didn’t really use my cards.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

I lay down in the grass. I curl up on my side, my body folded, knees drawn in.

“Is everything okay?" he asks.

I make a sound.

“Gotta give me a little more than that, Buck.”

I want you to come home. I want you to hold me. I want you to come here and lay in the grass and hold me. I want to fall into this earth with you.

“I’m tired,” I say.

“You should rest. Take a bath. Order in.”

“That sounds nice.”

I could pretend my body is not dissolving from the inside. Pretend that I have another thirty years. Pretend that I could spend those years puttering around the apartment with Steve, watching him become more beautiful every year. Watch him grow up, really grow up, turn thirty, celebrate both of his ages, two cakes, why not, I don’t care if I get fat and even grayer. I could pretend myself a life where I never have to worry about becoming what I was, a man dragged around because he was so weak he couldn’t walk, who had to have his ass cleaned after they wrapped him and blinded him and deafened him and tied him down, who had to be washed, he’d flit in and out of drugged unconsciousness while they did it, they were never even cruel about it, it was just another task of cleansing, a gauzy nightmare he couldn’t control, he couldn’t control anything, not his body, not his mind. And in his indignity, he made childish, half-witted bargains with himself, promised what he’d do if he ever got free — if I ever— if this ever— I will _never—_ He forgot his bargains for a long time.

But I remember them. Just let me, and I will _never._ Not ever again. Not for SHIELD, not for Tony or Peggy, not for Steve. Not for any cause, not for any man. I will never be that again.

I’m smiling as I listen to Steve tell me about the academy. I know it all, every corridor, every fragment of curriculum, but I like to hear it from him. He could be there, some day, if he wanted to. I tell him. He could teach. He could be an instructor. He could run the whole fucking system. He could do anything.

He chuckles. “I don’t know about that.”

Of _course_ you could become that, I want to say. Of course you could.

“I don’t know if I’d want to do something like that,” he adds. “I just don’t know. I don’t know about any of this.”

“Just give it some time. Something will speak to you. There’s a place for you. And if there isn’t one, well, you’re Steve Rogers. I’m sure you’ll gouge one out with your bare hands.”

Now he’s the one making the inscrutable sound.

I look down the length of my outstretched arm, at the unconscious way my fingers close around the blades of grass and pass through them, like Andre passing his fingers through my hair. Through Steve’s.

“I’m proud of you,” I say softly. “You’re doing so well.”

There’s a pause on Steve’s end. “Really?”

“Yes. You’re better than I thought. You’re better than me.”

“Now, that’s just bullshit,” he says with a low, dismissive chuckle.

I tighten my hand and pull up broken blades of grass with it. “No, it’s not. All the rest is window dressing. It’s all gravy now.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“Well if it did, you wouldn’t be you. And that’s what it takes to be the best.”

“What, always thinking you’re not good enough?”

He says it with disdain, in a way I have never disdained this concept in its employment.

“Well, it worked for me.”

“I spent enough time thinking I wasn’t good enough. I’m kind of sick of it.”

“Fair enough. But you’re ready.”

Steve pushes out a slow breath. “Can we not talk about this?”

I roll onto my back, eyes squinting at the almost electric gray of the overcast sky. “Sure. What do you wanna talk about?”

“How about this campus? The lake, the trees? God, I can’t even imagine it all in a month.”

I grin. “I’m sorry, is this Steve Rogers from Brooklyn, New York?”

“I know, who would have thought. But…” He makes a small contemplative sound. “I could get used to this.”

I wonder if he’s looking at them now, if he’s outside, maybe the fourth floor observation deck. Probably not that. He wouldn’t want to risk being overheard by some senior cadet nestled in one of the all-weather chairs, studying. Maybe he’s just walking, a solitary man, large and imposing, thoughtful and sweet just below.

“I told you you can live wherever you want,” I remind him. “You don’t need to live in DC. Or any city. You could live in the woods, work remotely, train like Rocky in the forest.”

“Like who?”

I sigh. “Put it on your list. There’s like five of them, so…”

“Would you ever live outside the city?”

“I don’t know. I just— I dunno.” I want to tell him that I would live anywhere, if I could be with him. I don’t know when the possibility of any contented future began to hinge on his very close presence. “I kind of have to go.”

“Okay.”

He’s disappointed. He’s terrible at hiding it. Romanoff complains about it to me halfheartedly, his pathological guilelessness, his staggering inability to conceal his feelings.

“Hey…” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Just everything. All of it.”

“Okay,” Steve says briskly. “You’re welcome. I guess.”

I drag my metal hand over my forehead. “I might be out of the loop this week with work stuff, so if I don’t answer, don’t freak out.”

“Doing some relaxing, I hope.”

“Yeah,” I murmur. “I gotta go.”

“All right. See you when I get back.”

“Enjoy the trees.”

Neither of us hang up. I don’t know what he’s waiting for, what I’m waiting for. A dozen brazen confessions fight to tumble out of me. But I’m not like Steve. I’m uncomfortably good at deception.

“What did you talk about today?” I ask.

I imagine him shrugging. “Some of the stuff we discussed.”

I finger the grass again. It’s tender and pliable still, a good couple months from browning. “Can you give it to me?”

“The lecture?”

“I know you remember it.”

He does. I close my eyes, reposed atop the bodies of my parents, and I listen to his words, smooth and intimate, only for me, now. Someone he respects very much suggested that he talk about duty and the calculus of choice in war. This person implied that it was a kind of formula, composed of ideals and values and probabilities. And although he knows this person to be intelligent and wise, good-hearted and caring, it’s actually not very mathematical at all for him. These are choices he always made on instinct, the urges of his gut, his heart, with very little consultation from his mind. Cultivate this — he said he pressed his hand to his chest here — and hold your compass tight, don’t let anyone shake it out of your hand. If you do this, you have to risk being wrong. You have to risk people thinking you’re foolish or emotional. You have to risk loss. But you will never go to sleep and wish that you had been braver, that you had been truer to yourself. Because when it’s all over, when allies and enemies disperse to lick their wounds, you’re the one who has to live with yourself. You can be a mathematician, the best in the world, there’s nothing wrong with it. Maybe you’ll make better choices than me, and I’ve made some bad ones. I’ve regretted some of my actions, living this way, but it’s _my_ regret. That lives here, too. He must have clutched his chest again. I own all of it. That’s the only way I know how to be.

Steve says more. He talks about his triumphs, his errors. I am one of them. I swaddle myself in his voice. It’s a lullaby for a weary man.

He finishes and proclaims it ‘a little dramatic.’ I thank him, swallowing thickly. I tell him I miss him. He falls quiet and says ‘Bucky, I…” But Agent Mathis calls him away from me. I cradle the phone to my ear long after the line has gone dead.

Bucky, I… Bucky, I…

I color in the rest as I drive northwest on a road that cuts through thick forest. I fill it with my own heart until I ache with it, smiling. I mouth it.

Bucky, I…

Steve, I...

But I think he already knows. I know it, too.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

There’s not really a graceful way to dismount a hammock, especially not one like this. The pocket of it is deep, strung between two surly oak trees. You can only really roll, spear your legs out, and pray that you don’t dump onto the forest floor.

A couple years ago, I might have bounced as my feet hit the ground, refreshed from my three or four hours of rest, spry and ready for whatever the day could toss at me. But this morning, my joints feel cold and stiff, nearly as frozen as the air last night, and an unfamiliar pain shoots down my ass and leg like an electric current. I’m hobbling, a difficult gait to make quiet, as I walk the invisible perimeter I decided upon last night, a square of space I familiarized myself with enough to know what it looks like out of sorts.

This is ridiculous, of course. Even I recognize that.

But I wonder if the fear of being killed, of being harmed, has ever been my deepest concern. More latent, more primal, is the fear of being taken. Re-acquired. It would be a very raw deal now, a close out, heavily discounted Winter Soldier — on sale now, get yours before it’s too late. I wonder if Updesh has realized yet that I’m gone.

I pick a tree to piss against, nothing special about it except for its proximity to me. I think, distantly, tiredly, I might need to shit soon. I’ll have to be a bit more deliberate about my location for that, though who even knows why. It’s not like I have anyone to hide from. I’m just grateful that the ground is not yet frozen. I’ve dug cat holes in solid earth, and even with a super arm, it’s no enjoyable task.

When I planned this, as hamfistedly as I planned this entire endeavor, I thought I might end it as soon as I found the right spot. I imagined that some clearing would speak to me, some glorious overlook where I could watch the sun dip below the horizon one last time before launching a bullet into my skull. But I got here late, well after sundown. I wandered through the night and early hours, trying to get myself lost deep, with just a small flashlight to guide my way. I’m not keen on the idea of my leftovers traumatizing some hobby-hiker. So I walked and walked more, far from any paths I could find. I came out here knowing there was a lake, some lake I can’t even remember the name of, and I was inundated with a desire to see it.

I never did find it. Perhaps I’ll do that today.

I still my steps and I listen. The forest is rich with birdsong, with the whispers of animals scampering through brush. I imagine the sound of gunshot cracking through this orchestration, how it might collide with trees, how the birds might take to terrified flight. All that rustling, all that life, would stop until the echoes faded, maybe it would be quiet long after. I wonder how long it takes for nature to reorient around a violent, manmade death. But nature is no flimsy thing; I can’t imagine it not rebounding, until the air is full again.

At my bag, I tear open three packets of jerky and shove them down while crouched, stuffing wrappers into the pocket of my tac pants. Dying in pieces of my uniform is also an odious thought, a blight on my employer. This will already be so shameful to them, I can’t imagine they’ll respect or understand it. It may seem senseless, chaotic, especially to the majority who don’t know the state of my body. It’ll look like I couldn’t take it, like all my crazy finally caught up to me. This will look like a suicide.

But it’s not. I really don’t think it is. I’m already a dead man; I’m merely seizing power from this thing, this illness, this mistake. I’m taking control of my destiny. It’s what I do. It’s one of my most fervent imperatives.

I imagine everyone streaming into the office right about now, settling at their desks, sighing as they check their emails. I did as much work as I could over the weekend, left notes in my desk for the plans I couldn’t bring to fruition. It’s stupid, it’s not like they’ll observe the wishes of a dead man, and one with my ideas at that. But they’re free to run amok now. They can drive the training program into the ground, keep the most unworthy agents, forgive them their awful behavior, throw hundreds of thousands of dollars into training fuckups and idiots. They’ll reap their own rewards, I guess. Just like they did back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

I almost believe my own dismissiveness. But I can’t forget Steve. He’s going to work for them, I can’t imagine a world where he doesn’t take the job, after this. And they’ll be his problem. And that, unfortunately, is still a startling thought. A few bad apples on a STRIKE team — maybe only one bad apple — could mean life or death if they’re backing him up. This is one of the few terrors that still has a home in me.

I chase down mouthfuls of dried up meat with swigs of water from my jug. My impulse is to conserve it, though I’m not sure why I’m really bothering.

I pack up my makeshift campsite. I’m pretty sure the lake is west. I consider it with the impassivity of an assigned mission. Should I feel this numb? Is this normal?

But ‘normal’ has never been one of the parameters that’s governed my life. Not since the war, anyway. I stopped being anything close to it so long ago that I only know it in abstraction.

The sun climbs into the sky. And I move.

—

I find the lake around midday and set up camp a few hundred meters away. I set up my hammock and roll myself into it when my pulse abruptly starts racing, vision tunneling, flushing with cold sweat. The thing rocks slowly from the momentum of hoisting myself into it, a nauseating sway that blurs the canopy of leaves above me. Closing my eyes only seems to make it worse, magnifying every unpleasant sensation. I don’t know if this is my body or my mind, though I suspect it’s some conspiracy of both. I should have done it this morning, put an end to this ceaseless questioning, this unrelenting instability. Who gives a fuck about a sunrise, a sunset, a lake? None of that shit matters when you’re dead.

I might be lost enough that I won’t be found for a while. It could be days, a week, a month. I wonder how long it takes for the body to begin rotting, who will come for me first, if I’ll putrefy from maggots and bacteria and the breakdown of my metabolic systems or if the scavengers will get to me sooner. I could be a feast for the birds, for the coyotes and foxes and forest cats. The image is gruesome, sickening, but just below that drones a dim sort of satisfaction. At least that way, I would become something useful, taken into the bodies of others, becoming them, leaving behind just a torn scattering of clothes and an eerie set of organic and inorganic bones.

And the arm. Fuck.

My heart skitters in my chest. I press my hand to it. Something else begins burning in me, tightening my jaw, tensing my muscles. Why is there always more? Why is there always some other problem? When do my responsibilities end? Why can’t I just fucking rest?

I’m so tired.

I shove the heels of my palms against my eyes and let out a sob. Just one. I bite back the rest of them, choke them down the way I choke everything else down. I should do it now. I could do it right now.

The hammock sways me. I fall quiet and swipe my forearm over my face. This is pathetic. I am pathetic.

But… it really is nice here.

—

I don’t die on Wednesday.

—

On Thursday, I run out of water.

I’m not sure why this first struck me as alarming. It’s not like I haven’t gone days without it, with relatively few issues. I already ran out of food yesterday. So I know it’ll take me a while to feel any real effects from it aside from discomfort. And I know how to be uncomfortable. I’m excellent at it.

It’s more of a prompt than anything. Time to get this show on the road. It’s now or in a month, two, six, a wasted, pale death, probably an agonizing one, bedridden, shitting myself, delirious, screaming. I try to keep my future in mind when I feel inertia dragging me, but God, is inertia strong. It feeds me counterarguments — you don’t know if it’ll be that bad, you could die suddenly, no fuss, no muss. My nana died pretty quietly at home. We were there, I saw her during, I saw her after she was gone. I wouldn’t call it beautiful, but it wasn’t indignant. It wasn’t pathetic. It just was.

But the risk of dying bad feels immense and crippling. And Nana needed all of us, even me. I was the one who took her little terrier for a walk twice a day, I can’t remember its name, but it was cute, sweet, it cuddled up at her feet until she passed. And I could never ask anyone to bear that kind of load. I don’t want to be a burden, not even to people I might pay for it.

So I go back to square one again. It’s probably the fifth time I’ve been here today.

I try to read _Walden_ , but Thoreau’s words feel laborious, unwieldy, even as they speak of the divine freedom of simplicity. The book ends up sprawled open on my chest as I’m rocked by a vigorous wind. I don’t know why I’m wasting time. Like at my parents’ grave, I don’t know what I’m waiting for. Maybe I just want this — the suspended sway of my heavy body, the rustling of leaves overhead, the emptiness, the fullness of this place. I could have had this for years. I could have done the same thing I suggested to Steve — buy a country house in Virginia, work remotely, fashion some intensive, functional training regimen, convert some old barn to a throwing gallery, sit on the porch in the evenings and drink tea to the drone of cicadas, find the perfect light for my orchids in an old, multistory house, quench my sexual appetite in quieter, more solitary ways. I can’t imagine that I would have felt less fulfilled than I did in DC, if one would even dare to call my existence there fulfilling. This is another word that I can only guess the meaning of, academically.

And Steve could be there, too. He could have his own room down the hall from mine, private and filled with light, he could decorate it any way he chose. We could meet in the study at night, a room with inlaid bookshelves, fat with our shared collection. There would be a couch and two large, upholstered chairs next to a window. We could read there, talk late into the night, we might even sit on the couch together, very close, he could rest against me or me against him, I don’t know which one makes me feel warmer inside, I’d take any version of us now, right now.

I know I’ll be gone, but I’m still going to miss him.

—

I found the spot. It took a bit of walking, but I found a vista with a thick outcropping of rock to sit on. It’s a breathtaking view — the sea of trees hugging the edge of a modest lake, the sun tucking in behind the mountains. I think this is what I’ve been looking for.

I inhale deeply, cigarette smoke burning my throat and lungs, but it’s times like this that I remember why I’ve missed it so much. It kills time. Slows everything down. I think I’m waiting to feel content with this, urging it along with nicotine and a review of the things I’ve accomplished, the arrangements I’ve made, the goodbyes I’ve said. I remind myself of my probable fate, remind myself that this is my solution, mine, and it’s a good one. I’m waiting for permission to let go of this. From who, from what, I don’t know.

I scrape the butt of my cigarette over the rock and add it to the straight row of three I smoked just before. My gaze then drifts to the sidearm resting next to my thigh. I’ve already rehearsed it, nothing too dramatic, no final words. Who would they possibly be for? Left hand, brainstem shot through the mouth. There’s nothing sexy about it, hardly even anything comforting about the idea. It just feels like the only way to stop this. To stop everyone from risking themselves to save me, spare their preoccupations with my dying form or their denial that there’s anything wrong with me at all. I just want to rest. I want my friends to have closure. Am I impaired somehow, that I can’t see another way around this? What—

My head snaps up, senses tuned to a sound that wasn’t there just a moment ago, a thumping, large, loud, louder. My pistol is in my hand and I’m twisting around, aim trained on the sound, the thing, the man, approaching me.

Steve sees me and slows, his body sagging, one hand drifting down and back to his side. He pulls in and pushes out the hungry, gasping breaths of a man who has just sprinted for a very, very long time.

I lower my pistol. I’m at once profoundly glad and disappointed to see him.

He bends at the waist and braces his hands on his knees. It looks like he might be sick, like one of his heaving breaths might turn into just heaving, but he keeps it together, his eyes locked hard on mine, like he’s planning for me to take advantage of his exhaustion and bolt.

When he stands, he digs a cell out of the pocket of his tac pants. It’s not his, some fat but sleek flip phone with a for-shit extendable antenna.

“I found him.” He glares at me. “Alive.”

There’s a small volley of crisp communication, _yeah, okay, good, okay, thanks_. I watch him with heavy eyelids and a heavy stomach. I have half a mind to lie down on this rock, I feel so scraped out that I might collapse in on myself, fall asleep. Maybe I could sleep until this part is over.

Steve puts the phone back into his pocket and stares at me for a few gravid moments. His brows are gathered and his mouth is slack, like he’s on the cusp of some comment. I can’t tell if he’s angry or relieved or something completely outside of my imagining.

He walks over and climbs onto the rock, taking a seat next to me. When he spots my pistol, he takes it in hand, deftly pulls the clip out, unchambers the loaded round, and tosses the clip and the loose bullet off the edge of the overlook. They fly in majestic arcs before dropping into the tree line below. My chest goes tight as they soar and disappear.

“How’d you find me?” I ask.

Steve takes a slow, heavy breath before answering. “Stark got your little letter. I was closer.”

I nod. “But, I mean, how’d you actually find me?”

He tilts his chin toward my left arm. Fucking Tony.

“I’m taking you home,” Steve says flatly.

I sigh. The sky is a glorious and deep shade of pink. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. This would have been the right time to do it.

Or maybe not. I just don’t fucking know anymore.

“Okay.”

—

I hike my bag up on my shoulders as we begin our ascent to my apartment. I fall a couple of steps behind Steve and not even deliberately. My body is battling every flight, muscles weak, anxiety tearing through me at the thought of what we’re going to walk into. The letters. The notes. I don’t even know how to run interference on something this egregious. Maybe I don’t get to. Maybe it’s my punishment for doing this.

No words have passed between us since he told me he was bringing me home. He watched me, stone-faced, arms crossed, as I fumblingly packed up my campsite. We walked in silence through the woods after, me following, trying to keep his aggressively steady pace. The helicopter ride wasn’t terrible, it was just so loud, but the cab after was almost unbearable, because all I wanted to do was apologize, even with someone listening, even risking whatever response I might get, I wanted to do something. I would have taken a punch in the face over that kind of depthless, barren quiet.

My heart pounds as we step through the door. I busy myself locking it behind us and setting the alarm while Steve’s heavy steps tread and then stop. When I turn to him, he has the stack of letters in his hand. I let my pack drop to the floor.

I watch. His shoulders climb and fall with every labored breath as he tucks his finger beneath the flap of the envelope addressed to him. I’m frozen as he reads through it, as his jaw shifts and his eyes narrow. His head shakes and, soon, so does the letter. He eyes me hard, presumably when he finishes. He keeps his stare locked onto mine, apoplectic, as he drops the letter onto the countertop, letting it float down and swoosh across the granite.

I open my mouth and— I try to speak, I try to say I’m sorry, but he’s already turning away and stalking to the orchids. He snatches my instructions, casts them disgusted looks, and crumples them in his hand, one after the other after the other, wadding them into a giant ball of hurt and anger.

“Fucking bullshit,” he mutters.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? Sorry for leaving me with this pile of fucking notes? ‘Went to the woods to blow my brains out, just water my plants, okay? You’ll be fine. You’re always fine.’”

He clamps both hands over the ball of notepaper and crushes it.

“Steve, I—”

“How fucking _dare_ you. This is how you say goodbye?” He holds up the dense ball of paper and then throws it at me. It hits the floor and skitters to the toe of my right boot.

“You’re selfish, you know that? You’ve been managing every moment of my life since I got back, pretending to ‘protect’ me, trying to force me into a job I don’t even fucking want, tossing me a credit card like it’s actually freedom.” He chuckles, humorlessly. “Nice little sleight of hand there, by the way. It almost worked.”

“You’re right,” I say.

“And fucking off into the woods to kill yourself? Without saying anything to anyone? And your bullshit about having to work, ‘don’t worry if I’m out of the loop,’ fuck you. _Fuck_ you, Bucky.”

I’ve been called out a few times for my bad behavior, not nearly as many as I deserve, but this is by far the most brutal. I swallow.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care if you’re sorry,” he snaps. “You act like you live on some island where nothing you do has any effect on anyone. This pile of letters? You think that’s good enough? Tie up all your loose ends with some bullshit backhanded compliments and think that we’re all just gonna shrug and move on? Hey, you got what you want, we got a couple scraps of paper, so it’s fine!”

My mouth flattens. “I left you with more than a couple scraps of paper.”

Steve lets out an indignant huff. “You think I give a shit about your money? About your apartment?”

How do I explain it? It would take a day, maybe longer, to tell him what this feels like. It would take the long and grim lesson about my life with Hydra, not just the fluffy late night Cliff’s Notes summary, but the real filth, a deep dive into the abject helplessness, the terror, the degrading and arduous road I took to be even remotely functional, let alone someone who could do what I do. I promised myself, I goddamn promised I wouldn’t let myself be lost again. But here I am, I’m losing more every day. I’ve been trying to save him from all of this, to save myself from having to explain my life, my choices, to anyone.

I venture a few steps into the kitchen but keep my distance from my pile of letters. “You won’t listen. None of you will listen. I’m dying. I’m not depressed, I’m not delusional, I’m not giving up.”

“No,” Steve says, hands coming to rest on his hips. “You’re just acting like your actions have no consequences.”

“Steve, I am _dying_.” I say it slowly, annunciating every word as clearly as I possibly can, with how unsteady my bones feel.

“Fine! But you don’t get to die like this.”

I feel my spine going slack. I’m overcome by that same feeling I had on the rock, to lie down right here, to sprawl on the floor and go quiet.

“I really don’t think you understand,” I say softly.

“I know what dying is. But you don’t get to decide how everyone else lives just because you’re sick.”

“I don’t wanna be controlled. Not by you, not by this, not by anyone.”

Steve scoffs. “You think _I_ like it? But you don’t get to just throw your shield at me and off yourself and call it a day. That’s not how this works.”

“Not how what works?”

“Life,” he says bluntly. “ _You’re_ the black-and-white one. You act so fucking holy, like you’re the only one who understands death and stakes. But I know those things pretty goddamn well, too.”

I can’t even argue with him. He does know. He’s looked death in the eye, very personally, many times. He ushered his mother through her own sickness all the way to the end, almost single handedly, refusing my help at every turn. And Steve Rogers knows stakes. His existence has been almost entirely composed of them, most actively angling against him.

But this conversation is exhausting. I don’t know what to say, how to make it stop. I just want it to stop.

“What do you want from me, Steve?”

“I want you to think about other people,” he says.

A bitter laugh wrings out of me. “That’s all I fucking do! I live my entire life for other people. It’s all I do. I just wanted one thing for myself. One choice for myself.”

“Well, it’s a shitty choice. And you’re not deciding just for yourself. Your life means something. Your _death_ means something.” He stalks back to the counter, grabs the letter for Peggy off of the countertop, and glares at her name scrawled in my handwriting. “And this is how you say goodbye to Peggy? After she saved your life? She deserves a little better than that, don’t you think?” He flings the letter at me. It bounces off of my chest and lands at my feet. “God. Fuck you.”

Yes. She does deserve better. I don’t argue. I’m completely out of things to say. I can’t see any high road anymore, or even a low one for me to crawl down.

“I should take a shower,” I say weakly.

“Yeah, you should,” Steve spits. “Jesus.”

I look to the papers at my feet, my half-assed effort to say the things I’m too cowardly to say in person. I walk away from them, shoulders hunched, with no right to look like the kicked dog I know I must resemble. I hoist myself up to my room, gripping the rail, and grab my joggers, a shirt, and underwear. I glance down from time to time to find Steve slumped on the couch, head resting back on the cushion, eyes closed, one hand pressed over his chest, the other over his stomach.

I decide on a bath. Maybe it’ll help reset me, reset all of this, bring me to some more relaxed, more competent place where I can salvage our friendship. I wash all the stink and dirt off in the shower first, but sinking into the bath doesn’t feel relaxing at all except in a vague, bodily way. I eye the door, wondering if Steve will come to it, if he’s already on the other side of it. He’s good at sneaking now, I try to will him to do just that, to creep across the wood floor, to come to me, to pause, to listen.

“Steve?” I say softly.

There’s no reply.

I sink into the water. After a couple more minutes, I hit the drain and get out.

I pause in the living room after. He’s where I left him, breathing shallowly.

“Steve.”

He slowly cranks his head around. He looks so, so tired. “What?”

I pause here, because I don’t know what I intended to say.

“Would you…” I tilt my head up the stairs.

He doesn’t move, he only examines my face, I’m not sure what he’s looking for. Maybe contrition or sadness, maybe the exhaustion we seem to be sharing in this moment. I’m sure it’s all there. When he doesn’t do anything but stare, I turn and make my way up the stairs. I click on the bedside lamp, lie on my bed, and look up at the ceiling.

He doesn’t come right away, but when he does, he’s quiet. Slow. He pauses next to the bed, he’s still in his SHIELD uniform, the one that makes him look like STRIKE, tall and black and imposing, even with his weary face.

Steve sits down on the edge of the bed. He sags at the waist and rests his forearms on his legs, hands clasped together, t-shirt pulled tight over his back. He sighs and shakes his head slowly.

I roll onto my side and stretch my arm across the comforter. I can just barely reach him, fingertips brushing against the thick muscle of his lower back.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur.

“I don’t forgive you.”

I feel my eyes go wide. “Okay. Well, I want to say it. And I mean it.”

He nods.

I swallow. I’m too aware of how wildly inappropriate it would be to ask him for anything, no matter how empty I feel right now, no matter how sure I am that he could make me feel less so.

I let my hand drop to the mattress. He looks over his shoulder at me, his expression difficult to read. Then he straightens his shoulders, twists his torso from one side to the other, spine popping. It strikes me that I could watch him all day, I could watch him do anything, even if I never got to speak to him again, never got to touch him again. I could content myself just marveling at his existence.

“I’ve been out of line,” I tell him. “I’ve been fucking up ever since you got back.”

“I’m not obtuse. I knew something was going on.”

“Why didn’t you tell me what a dick I was being?”

He snorts. “I did try a few times.”

“Yeah, but not with your usual— intensity.”

Steve gives half a shrug. “I dunno. I just got you back. And I’m still figuring you out. I’ve been trying not to go full Steve Rogers on you.”

I press the side of my face into my pillow. “Well, I deserved it.”

“Yeah. You did.”

“Don’t let me get away with any more shit, okay?”

“Or you could just stop being an asshole.”

I give a heartless laugh. “I’ll try.”

His body shifts as he lays down on the mattress, and I can’t help it anymore, I’m pulling him by the shoulder, rolling him. I can barely stifle my relief as he reaches for me, he’s still a little stiff, but we weave our legs together, and I push my face to his neck. He smells like the woods.

“I can handle whatever you have,” he says. “If you really believe all that stuff you wrote, you know it’s true.”

“I know.” I do. That part was true. It all was.

“Then stop it,” he hisses. “Stop the bullshit. I’m here. Talk to me.”

I nod against him and push my leg deeper between his own, and he curls his thigh over mine. He’s almost oppressively warm, but I don’t mind.

“I wanna stop,” I tell him. “I just want everything to stop.”

“Everything?”

I shake my head. “Not everything.”

“So, what don’t you want to stop?”

“I want to…” I pause but don’t have to consider much, because an answer leaves me with knee-jerk quickness. “Have some purpose. I wanna know I did a good job.”

Steve’s arms tighten around me. “You did a good job.”

It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like a down escalator I’m always sprinting up. No matter how much power I push into my legs, I never climb higher. But I stay my course with dogged determination, with no more self-awareness than a hamster on a wheel, climbing and climbing to nowhere.

“Why does it feel like I haven’t done anything?” I whisper.

His hand moves up and down my spine, a soothing road he travels over and over. “I dunno. Maybe you haven’t done the things you really want.”

I make a sound. It’s possible. That might be possible.

I lift my head. He’s so close, his brow serious, even in spite of this tenderness. He’s got some mileage there already, a deep, brooding groove. It makes him that much more handsome, in ways I’m not sure I’m enhanced by my own lines.

His eyes search mine. My chest swells, a delirious ache that blooms until I kiss him.

When we start kissing, we don’t stop. It’s been too long coming, both of us wanting, both of us waiting. His hands slip underneath my shirt and strip it off. We only pause enough to pull articles of clothing off of each other, parting and surging back to kiss again. Nothing feels rushed about it — a shirt here, some pants there. The air in the room thickens with our breaths, our sighs, the slide of hands over skin. We kiss until I feel drunk, stupid with wanting for him, I touch him everywhere. I pull him against me and open my mouth for him, take his tongue. He rolls us over and lies on top of me, I could let him smother me with the weight of his body, the force of his desire, I claw at him, I can’t get him close enough, even with all my limbs wrapped around him.

I wanted this in the forest, I wanted this with my parents. I wanted this kind of death, the one where you break yourself open, crack at your seams, and let another person pour in.

I let him pour into me.

—

I let out a soft groan. It’s a little shaky, everything is a little shaky now — my hands, my thoughts. The only thing that feels steady is Steve. I plant my hands on the solid mass of his flexing thighs and squeeze.

He rises and drops back down, his head falling back with a sigh. God, he is resplendent. It’s been such a slow fuck, I can’t say how long we’ve been doing this, creeping to the edge and pulling back, I’d call it agony if it didn’t feel so fucking good.

“Are you sure?” I say, my reply delayed by I don’t even know how many seconds or minutes. This has been the cadence of our conversation, this entire fuck has been one long, drawn out discussion.

Steve looks down at me. His face is flushed, his bottom lip wet. “Yeah. I think so.”

He thinks he doesn’t want to be Captain America. I told him he could do anything, be anything, and I guess that means even just being a regular person.

“Okay,” I breathe.

He grinds down on me, and I press my hand to my mouth, eyes squeezing shut. I don’t know why I’m still doing it. What else could I have to hide now? I don’t think I have anything left. I don’t know what else I’m still trying to hold inside, why it feels so hard to stop this tiring routine.

I feel his fingers around my wrist, and then my hand is gone but not empty. He presses his palm to mine and threads our fingers together. I clench my jaw reflexively.

“Stop,” he says. He keeps moving, like he’s trying to goad the sound out of my body.

“God,” I moan.

“Look at me.”

I do. Will it always ache, just doing this one thing?

“I don’t want this to stop,” I say.

The corner of Steve’s mouth curls up.

“Not just this.” I look to the place where our bodies are joined, where my cock disappears inside of him.

He settles down on me, presses his hands to my chest, and bears down. I feel myself sink beneath his power, his restraint. I feel the full, paralyzing intensity of him as he looks into my eyes. He shudders through my core and shakes my roots. This is what always made me pull away, change the conversation, angle my body to keep from touching him. Anything to escape his gravity.

But I can’t now. I am in a decaying orbit, and there’s only one place this ends. And I’m scared. I am really fucking scared.

Steve brushes the backs of his fingers over my jaw, my cheek. His expression shifts, collapsing, tensing into something serious, maybe even a little sad. He doesn’t stop moving, even when those fingers grab my chin hard, when his upper lip curls into a sneer that doesn’t match the glimmering sweetness in his eyes.

“Fucking asshole,” he says. “I can’t believe you.”

I feel my own face go soft, and I curl my fingers around the hand clutching at my chest. “Yeah.”

He lets go of my chin and plants that hand next to my head, bracing himself. He dips down to kiss me fierce, as fierce as he was born. He pulls away but just barely, his nose brushing mine, lips so close that I could take them again with the slightest tilt of my head.

“You know I love you, right?” Steve breathes.

I blink. I’m nodding.

“Like _love_ -love,” he clarifies.

“I know what you meant.”

He touches my face, my parted lips. “Let me give my blood to SHIELD. Just them. I know they’ve got some high security lab somewhere.”

He’s right. There’s one deep in the basement that exists exclusively for things like this. Where they started work on my own blood, probably. Only the top docs with the top clearances can get in and out.

“And I do understand what’s going on,” Steve continues. “I’m not denying it. It’s because I understand that I wanna try.”

“Fine. But this is a little manipulative, don’t you think?” I say.

His smirk is cocky and not entirely playful. “Yeah? How does it feel?”

Not especially good.

Steve draws in a deep breath through his nose and pushes himself upright. He smears his hands over my torso, teeth sinking into his lower lip. “Do you like it when I fuck you?”

I give a shaky nod. I grab his ass with both hands and make some barely human sound. God, I need him. I need him to move. I guide him, clutch his ass and pull, and he shifts his hips, lets me have him, he slides steadily up and down my cock, groaning, fighting to keep his eyes open. He moves until I feel an immense urgency to push up into him, and he must know it. He must know I’m so close.

“You wanna come?” he asks.

My head rolls to the side and my brows tense, a look that feels pained. “Yeah.”

He doubles down, rolling into a steady, unrelenting rhythm. I can only apologize, over and over, I’m at the point of no return, and he fucks himself onto me so hard that it almost feels like an act of aggression, I fucking deserve it, I deserve his anger, this strange and desperate fuck of ours. He shoves me over the edge, and I let my mouth hang open. I make the sounds I make, and Steve’s body rocks through it, fingertips digging hard into my chest.

“ _God_ ,” he says roughly.

I’m almost tearful when he slows, I don’t know why. It’s too much, and he must know it, because he’s careful now. Gentle. I pull in ragged breaths, drained and lightheaded, shapes and colors shifting like a camera lens straining into focus.

He’s still as I float my way through it, until I’ve gathered enough of my senses to notice his cock laying on my stomach, hard and glistening at the tip.

“Sorry,” I repeat. I don’t know how many times I’ve said it tonight. Sorry for fucking off into the woods. Sorry for the letters. Sorry for being selfish. Sorry for coming before you.

“Mm, that’s okay.” He swipes up the lube bottle lying next to us and squeezes a generous pool into his palm. “I’m just gonna jerk off on you.”

My eyebrow edges up. That’s one new term he’s got down pat.

And he can deny it a thousand times, I still don’t know if his modesty is fake or real, but Steve really is a showman. He leans over me again, braced on one huge arm, pumping his huge cock, his teeth clenched, eyes dark and boring into mine so hard that I’m almost recoiling from the force of it. The force of him. I shove my hand in his hair and egg him on, I want his come all over me, I tell him just that, and he growls as he shoots off all over my chest.

We breathe for a while. It’s like coming out of a hypnotic haze, not entirely sure of what just happened but completely fine with it nonetheless. He drapes himself over me and we kiss when the impulse hits, when it feels too intimate to look in each other’s eyes.

Eventually, he sits up, I’m not even sure when I slipped out of him. Steve rolls to my side and eyes the come splattered on me. He dips a tentative fingertip into it and swipes it over his tongue. I don’t hide my amusement as I watch him consider the taste, like he’s sipped a mouthful of merlot and is trying to guess all the notes.

He tips his head. “It’s not that bad.”

I smile. Then I lean in and kiss him again. I just can’t seem to stop.

—

“You should think about this Cap thing, though. Really.”

It’s dark, except for the stove light. It’s quiet, except for Chopin and whatever’s been burbling out of us. Some of it is substantive, some of it’s not. But we’re in my bed in our underwear, and I think we’re content. For now.

“What’s there to think about?”

“Look… if you wanna walk away, I respect that. I do. But I also know that it doesn’t mean nothing to you.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Unless I’m totally off the mark,” I add.

“No. You’re not.”

“It could be good to really dive in, talk to Fury, talk to Hill, Tony, Coulson, Romanoff, I can introduce you to Victoria Hand. She’s pretty scary, but she knows a lot. You could get a sense of the work from them, what they can offer you, what you could offer the organization. Let yourself think as big or as small as you want.”

“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

I can’t fight the nagging suspicion that he’s already made up his mind. Maybe he has. He’s always so certain. I don’t know where he gets it from. I have to let go of the outcome, though. I have to find a way to both walk away and stay right here.

“While I’m thinking,” he says, nudging me in the sternum with his finger, “what are you gonna do?”

“Oh, who knows.”

“No, no. You don’t get to dodge. Don’t think, just say it. What do you want?”

“I wanna be selfish,” I blurt it out and move to clarify. “Not like what I just did, that was shitty. But I wanna do something for myself.”

He hums softly into my shoulder. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. I guess I need to think about it.”

“Whatever it is, you can do it. You’re free, too.”

I wonder how far it’s sunken in, if he really knows he’s talking about the freedom to do what I want for however long I have before my body shuts down. However long that is. A year of freedom. Six months of freedom. Less. More. I just don’t know.

But that’s okay. It doesn’t feel horrible when he says it. Because I’m all out of secrets, I’ve sinned wantonly against him, and he’s still draped over me in my bed. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what he’s going to do. But breaking open isn’t so bad. I could even get used to it.

“You gonna kick me out soon?” Steve asks.

“No.”

He makes a small sound. “You know I’m like a stray cat. Once you let me in, feed me a little, let me sleep in the bed, you’re kind of stuck with me.”

I smile and press a kiss to the top of his head. I don’t think I’d mind that one bit.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader. 
> 
> Additional warnings at the end

Mission controller meetings are usually my thing. It doesn’t have the glamor of the weekly intelligence briefings, all the hot gossip about the Big Three organizational threats, along with the scattering of weird shit that drops onto the radar. Controller meetings are about protocols, surveillance and communications technologies, team dynamics, leadership strategies. It’s my forum to complain about the minutiae of mission planning, I’m a details guy, a contrarian, the devil’s most enthusiastic advocate. I can see shit that could go wrong from a hundred clicks away, and I stink up the room with my naysaying and doubting. I also have ideas, I’m not some dickhead who’s all problems and no solutions. And my ideas are good. I enjoy the play of it. Sometimes I think I like it when everyone is against me. It’s invigorating, being problematic.

But today, none of the conversation feels even remotely engaging. Even the dumbest ideas from the dullest of minds can barely bait my interest.

“Barnes?”

I straighten my posture. “Yeah?”

Hill’s brows are raised, waiting. “Thoughts? You’ve been disturbingly quiet.”

“Sounds fine to me.”

I don’t know what sounds fine. And I… don’t really care.

She gives a perplexed tilt of her head, but she doesn't push me. I guess you don’t push the guy who catastrophically melted down at work and nearly murdered a team of security forces just a couple weeks ago.

There’s a not at all sly exchanging of looks between Hill and some of the others. Let them look. I’m used to this. It skims off me like a weak breeze.

After, I sit in my office, twirling in my chair. I’ve barely chipped into the stack of emails I missed when I was on my little mission of self destruction last week. Normally, it would drive me crazy, this nagging itch of unfinished business. But the weight of it doesn’t feel oppressive today. It really doesn’t feel like much of anything at all.

I pick up my phone and clear through notifications. None of them are Steve.

My head drops against the back of my executive’s chair. It’s not fine. It’s not bad. It’s just… nothing. It’s like nothing even happened. The world continued dragging forward and mine has decidedly stalled.

I turn to my laptop and crank out an email to Hill. Not feeling great. Gonna take the day off. Maybe tomorrow too. Call my personal cell if you really need me.

I sign off with my last name, close my laptop, and lock it in my drawer. I grab my jacket.

And I go home.

—

It’s light when I wake up. After two days of doing this, my heart no longer races at the mistaken realization that I’m late for something. My arms drift out like a lazy crucifixion. Yesterday I laid like this for almost two hours, I wish I could say that I was doing what I’m supposed to be doing. Figuring out what I want my life to be. But my thoughts mostly traveled back to the woods, the steady rocking of my hammock, an ancient motion that apparently soothes even grown men in full existential crisis. I remember it in broad panoramas. I remember the smell of leaves on the cusp of turning, the rich, earthy decay of the forest floor. I remember the sounds of a world that couldn’t care if I was alive or dead, the vast immensity of nature, where nothing seems special about any one thing, any one being. It felt nice, weaving myself into that tapestry.

And I remember Steve, dashing in to rescue me from my own desperation. His disappointment. His rage. The crushed paper. Everything after. The bed already feels empty without him. He was only with me for a week, but I could barely sleep with him there. It wasn’t for lack of comfort or want for that very thing. It was an insomnia of disbelief, drifting out of my body and slamming back into it when I felt his arm twitch, when he turned and I felt the bottom of his foot press against my calf, when he made the noises he makes, little grunts, pained hums from deep in the back of his throat. I would touch him then, I tried to do it softly, I didn’t want to wake him, I just wanted him to know I was there. I couldn’t believe I was there, doing that.

We didn’t fuck at all, but it felt okay not to. It felt right just to be there, to touch, to be easy and still with each other. It was nice to rest in that _I love you._

I don’t know what either of us are going to do, whether Steve will follow the destiny that we’ve all laid out for him, whether I will work until I drop dead or stagger into whatever world could possibly lie beyond this one. But the urgency has receded from these questions. Maybe it’s because I’m alone, in this timeless place of days off at home. Maybe it’s because I sent him away.

Okay, I didn’t actually send him away. We agreed to it. We discussed it. We decided on a week of separation, a time for Steve to learn — honestly, wholeheartedly learn — about SHIELD. To test the space and see if he can find his place in it. It took a campaign of assurances to convince him that I wasn’t going to try to off myself again. He’s still here in DC, and I’ve been wondering if I’m going to spot him on the street, or at Starbucks buying a mocha, maybe sitting on the Mall, maybe running. But we got him a hotel in Foggy Bottom, so he’d have to make an effort to find his way to me. And that would defeat the purpose of this, to ease the force of our contamination of each other, to give him a clear mind with which to make his important choices.

I only wish for my own clarity. I’m not sure what circumstances need to be created for it to come. But I’m pretty sure lying in bed all day isn’t helping any of this along.

I stretch and slide to sit on the edge of the bed. My heart leaps when I catch a notification, but once again, it’s not from Steve.

_I’m still pissed at you. Just wanted to let you know._

I feel a grin stretch across my face. I type.

_I’m really sorry. Thanks for letting me know you’re mad at me_

Tony probably won’t reply, but that’s okay. I’m just so damn relieved. It’s as much of an olive branch as I’ll ever get back from him. God knows I’ve tried to cast him about a hundred since last week.

I sigh and rise, pressing my hand to the base of my spine. I think I feel about 50 years old. It’s a strange experience, feeling my age. I can’t tell if I mind it. I don’t know why I don’t find it terrifying right now. But maybe it’s just a little too early in the morning for terror.

—

I keep calling in sick, and nobody seems to care. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the lack of pushback. I imagine Hill and Fury exchanging eyebrow raises, maybe stilted little smirks. I imagine even a hint of fondness there, however fondly the two of them could ever regard anyone in the workplace. Or at all.

On Thursday, I feel an urgent compulsion to clean the entire apartment. Every surface, every crevice, I’m down on my knees scrubbing floors, removing my books shelf by shelf and wiping down the wood. And then I rummage through the cupboards and drawers, through my closet, I yank out all the clothes that don’t quite fit and probably never will again, all the shit I don’t care about, shit I overbought and will never use even in a full lifetime, shit that makes me feel nothing or, worse, stuck. I’m ruthless about it, gutting the innards of my apartment with the determination of a marathoner.

By the time I’m done, I have five full garbage bags to toss or donate. It’s amusing to imagine some college student wandering around town in one of my $250 sweaters that he got from Goodwill for $30, blissfully unaware that he’s wearing the Winter Soldier’s castoffs. Good for him. I eye the bags impassively from where I lie on the couch, my exhaustion pulling me into the cushions. I think one is supposed to feel a sense of accomplishment from things like this, but it has the strange quality of a concession. A task of defeat. I can’t tell if it feels like my life or my death is the thing being defeated here, if this is a resignation to my demise or a resignation to my life. I haven’t been this confused in a very long time.

—

_I’m checking out Saturday morning_

I nod to myself, mouth twisting. Is that even enough time for something like this? I thought he would take more, that one week would stretch day by day into two. I’m not sure how to translate this brevity into meaning.

_Get all the intel you need?_ I type.

_Almost. I’m having a couple drinks with Phil on Friday_

I smirk. _Phil huh? Who asked who?_

_I had to ask him. He was very coy_

_Tell Phil I said hi_

_Will do_

This is that part where we pause, like when we can’t hang up the phone, when we strain to turn away from each other, always hoping that the other will land the next word. We said we would be good, just enough of a check-in to cover logistics and to confirm that I, indeed, have not fucked off somewhere to die.

_See you Saturday_

I shove my hand through my hair. And that’s all he wrote. I write _see you then_ but delete it. I write this instead:

_Meet me at Founding Farmers at 11 for brunch. I have to do some stuff at work first but I’ll be there_

_Great. Looking forward to it :)_

“Fuck.”

I drop my phone on the mattress. I’m okay, it’s okay, this is fine, this is _good._

So why does it feel fucked? Why does everything feel fucked?

I flop over onto my stomach and growl into my pillow.

—

I would do very, very bad things for a cigarette right now. I’ve been enumerating them, I’ve had more than enough time to form a not-quite-exhaustive list of deeds. I’d drive the getaway car in the robbery of a Chase Manhattan bank. I’d sell myself out for some late night big city vigilante action, clobber some rich, morally corrupt asshat for some powerless working class guy — or however vigilante justice works, I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d even loan myself out for a fuck, but I’m not sure I could do that now, even if I might have at some other desperate point in my life.

It’s all this standing. This waiting. This compulsive watch-checking. He said he was going to take the train, and I’ve been imagining the things that might be delaying him. Bound for the wrong direction, swarmed by fans, dead cell battery. I don’t know what this feeling is, it feels like a nest of writhing snakes in my stomach, sucking all the blood from my brain, making me stupid and emotional.

I’ve been flecking apart since Harding’s, a feeling like little slivers of me falling, floating off of me in a trail of wisps. It felt good to get a call from her yesterday, rousing me from one of my many naps, a friendly chat that ended with my offer to bring over Chinese. She’s still not back at work. She tried not to shuffle, to not press her hand to her ribs, I know what someone looks like when they’re trying to seem better than they are. But she looked pleased to see me, a little nervous about inviting me into her place, _I’m so sorry for the mess,_ she repeated in about eight different ways, but it was nothing more than a nice little space stirred up with use.

She left me alone for a few minutes to take a call. She told me to make myself at home, and not just her home, but Vanessa’s too. The space was lush with their shared things, a weave so deep that it was impossible to know whose things were whose. Maybe I was a little nosy, but I couldn’t help myself. I inventoried their furniture, some new, some particle board garbage that had clearly been following them from their pre-professional days. I bent over their shelves. I looked at the washed out color photos of them as children with their smiling families, the two of them together, so many of them together, in cities, in nature, in rooms, years and years of memories. I fielded the overexcited pit bull as he jumped on me, twisted my hips to avoid hits in the balls, but I was smiling. I felt cocooned in the contented normalcy they created together.

I press my hand to the front of my leather moto jacket. It’s stiff from the glossy rectangle of card stock tucked into the inside pocket. She found me holding it as gently as I’d hold a windowstruck bird, gazing at the picture of the two of them wrapped in each other’s arms, foreheads pressed together, eyes closed in suspended rapture.

_She Said Yes!_

_Vanessa Gutiérrez_

_Alyssa Harding_

_Save the Date_

_June 22, 2013_

She apologized when she caught me, said she thought to send me one but wasn’t sure if it was proper. We weren’t sure if anything about the visit was proper. But I just didn’t care. I didn’t _care_ , and she didn’t seem to have a lot of fucks to spare, either.

“Love to have you there,” she told me.

I could picture it, June by the sea, Harding and Vanessa beautiful, all of their families perfectly accepting, me in something sharp. And Steve, my plus one maybe, he could wear the suit I made him buy, I bet he looks amazing in it, deep gray, maybe with a lavender button down, I’d snigger quietly at what only I knew it meant, we’d keep it casual, friendly, I guess. Nobody knows how he is, how we are, whatever we are. I could construct a wall between us, a clear one where I could see him, smile at him, know that I could have him later, work open every button slowly, drag my mouth over every inch of skin I find, lick him like a creature, it’s all I really am.

It was so nice just being there, resting in their space. I said I’d try to make it. If I’m alive. I didn’t say that part. I don’t want to be macabre. Me, not wanting to be macabre. It’s as sure of a sign as any that something is off. Changing as surely as the rest of me.

“Hey.”

I suck in a gasp, startling at the sudden presence of Steve. That sensation in my gut uncoils and rockets through my limbs, filling me with a restless urge to move. I’m afraid — I don’t know why it’s fear — that I might throw my arms around him right here, pull him to me with a fierce and completely transparent desperation.

“Hey,” I breathe.

“Train was delayed.”

“It’s okay.”

I’m smiling, the kind that I work to make smaller, it feels like it’s exploding. I settle for a clap on his arm, one that lingers longer than it needs to. We just never talked about how to be yet, not in public, not really at all. I don’t know what we are. What this is.

“I missed you.” I whisper it, just in case.

“Missed you, too.”

He brushes his fingers against mine, subtle, just two guys standing a little too close, close enough to be an accident. I guess we kind of are, aren’t we? This wasn’t ever supposed to be.

And yet, here it is. It’s here and so alive that our bodies can barely contain it.

I tilt my head toward the door to the restaurant. “You ready?”

“I’ve been saving room,” Steve says, patting over his flat stomach. “Hope the table’s big enough.”

That, I can’t guarantee. But it won’t matter, it never does. We always find a way to make it work. It’s just what we do.

—

“I don’t know why the Bureau of Engraving sounds so boring,” Steve says thoughtfully. “It really wasn’t.”

“Yeah, who knew.”

He hasn’t been south of the Mall yet. A lot of people forget about everything over here, including me. I can’t remember the last time I was in the neighborhood on foot.

It took an act of considerable social contortion to get the reservation I promised. I hate using my dubious celebrity to beg for tables and tickets and room upgrades, but I’m not beyond it entirely, with the right motivators. We still had to wait in the packed doorway, where Steve politely indulged a couple of tourists who wanted a picture with him and one who wanted a shot with both of us. I endured it but not particularly generously. I just wanted a regular meal, a very good meal, no bullshit, no performance. And it was good. The uneasy solitude of my week dissolved in his light.

But he still hasn’t told me his decision, and the longer he waits, the worse it feels. It cast a thin stain over our meal, over our steps, over the voice of the tour guide as she ushered us through the magical world of money printing. I tried to distract myself by focusing on the food and the landmarks I’ve taken in maybe a thousand times, but more often than not, my attention drifted back to Steve. It’s hard for it not to. It’s not just strangers who find him impossible to overlook.

Steve slows, and I reflexively slow with him. He’s reading the banners draped above the entrance of—

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

An unseasonable heat engulfs me.

“You ever been here?” he asks.

I shake my head. Barely.

I feel him watching me. Trying to read me. “Do you want to go?”

“Not really.”

It’s not that I’ve avoided it actively. I’ve known about it, the way one knows about a distant conflict in some land that’s probably important but can’t be spared the attention. I’ve never walked this side of the street. I’ve never turned toward it. And that acknowledgement hits me with a rush of sickness.

And then I’m moving, leaving my mind somewhere on the sidewalk behind me, stepping forward until I feel taken, pulled, like a small boat on a mighty river. It takes me through the doors, where that otherworldly flow washes me inside and retreats.

There’s a nudge against my side. “You sure you wanna do this?”

I feel an urge to shrug, but this doesn’t seem like a place where shrugging belongs. I answer by drifting to the desk to buy our tickets. The clerks are polite but as sober as the interior. We’re lucky — if I dare call it luck, maybe it’s an unfortunate favor — that we get to start the tour right away. We’re pointed to elevators behind the information desk, fucking elevators, I look around for stairs, but I have a feeling this is part of the experience, being crammed in places with strangers.

A few people eyeball us on the way up, loading me with an almost unbearable anxiety. We’re dumped out onto an exhibit floor and straight into the horror — a photo of Ike, hands on his hips, part of a gaggle of GIs encircling dead bodies of Jews strewn on the ground. My stomach turns in on itself suddenly. Violently.

I don’t know if I can do this.

But I walk anyway. We both do. It starts in 1933, the next pictures aren’t as gruesome, some Germans with a muzzled shepherd, fair-haired little girls reading picture books about evil Jews. Eugenics. Kristallnacht. Throngs of would-be refugees. I wander through with dread that mounts with each step taken through time. I peek out from my own dismay now and then, enough to watch him stare incredulously at the photos, frown over their descriptions, shake his head with weary disgust. On the next floor, we’re sent down a path lined with rails, wood posts and wires, the walls brick, the ceiling industrial, pipes and cement. It’s a feeling of being corralled, people in front, people behind as we pass more ominous photographs, the path angles sharp, then again, and again, no sight of what’s ahead and then—

I freeze. It’s not like I haven’t seen one of these before in pictures, in my early days of cobbling together history. But seeing one of the railcars like this, our path forced into and through it, I can’t seem to go any further.

Steve moves in close, shoulder and arm pressed to mine. He doesn’t say anything, and I hope he doesn’t. I just need him to be quiet right now.

It’s here, right here, where all of my musings about being pushed across some fake bridge that leads to the truth— it all feels so fucking stupid. So self-pitying and infantile. Because _this_ is force. This is no bridge to honesty, what a joke, to be terrified of something so easy. This is a bridge to slaughter. And I’m pulled forward again by a sick kind of curiosity, as urgent and painful as a spasm, to find — to feel — the answer to a question I’ve been too scared to ask with any sincerity at all.

I fight the compulsion to rush through it just to tick off some box on my good Jew card. I make myself go slow, I make myself step inside, I pause and plant myself against the edge of the little fence that lines the walkway, separates me from the dark innards of the car. I wonder what it would feel like to climb over, to lay my feet on the actual floor of it, not this sanitized walkway but to put myself in there. If I’d been lucky enough to survive getting shot in some pit by the death squads that killed most of us Litwaks, I could have been packed in here with 80 people, forced to stand, shitting in a single bucket, overwhelmed and gagging from the stench, trembling as we crawled to an unknown destination. Me and my _mame_ and Rebecca, whoever my father would have been, maybe I wouldn’t have been this me, but I would have been some me.

I grip the wooden rail tight, swallowing back my nausea.

I feel Steve next to me again. He doesn’t lean. He doesn’t speak. He’s only there. I’m not quite grateful for his presence, but it feels important. I don’t know if I would be standing here like this, with this luxury to even imagine these horrors in the flesh, if he wasn’t close now.

I push away from the rail and step out, greeted by a looming metal banner that reads _Arbeit Macht Frei_. I feel a numbness beginning to saturate me, the tranquilizing droop at the tail end of an adrenaline rush. But it’s like a blanket over a jittering swarm of crabs, it’s all just underneath, writhing. I look at pictures but can’t quite feel them, mugshots of undesirables, a claustrophobic barracks, a model of families being herded to their deaths. I seem to have reached some point of diminishing emotional impact. I’m not sure how high the pile of atrocities could stack, if it would ever topple over, if I would ever collapse under its weight.

What kind of people would go to such lengths to destroy someone like me? Who would commit such innovative brilliance, such enthusiasm, to murdering an entire race?

I don’t have answers for any of it. Not when even the questions themselves seem impossible.

The last floor is dedicated to liberators. I think this is supposed to be the good part, the one where faith in humanity is slowly reconstituted. I stare into the hard, determined eyes of the Jews who fought back and wonder if I could have been one of them. But I only find doubt there. This man I am, that man I was, I don’t know if he would have been strong enough, brave enough, for that. If I hadn’t fallen, would I have been one of those GIs gawking at corpses, trying not to cry or throw up? Or maybe I would have felt like this, my overwhelm pushing me to the fringes of dangerous indifference.

“Hey!”

I turn toward the sound of Steve’s voice. I thought he was right next to me, but he’s not. He’s got his hand clamped around the forearm of some young woman, a camera clutched in her grip. He’s leaning in close, hissing in her face. He shakes her. _Have a little fucking decency._ She looks flushed and afraid as he lets her go and stalks his way back to me, tossing a warning glare at her over his shoulder.

“What the hell was that?”

“Nothing. Just some idiot.”

I look to the woman as she passes us, wiping her hand over her cheek, gaze averted to the floor.

Steve takes a deep breath and makes a show of reading the wall of rescuers, but I can tell he’s not absorbing any of it. When he’s pissed like this, maybe already second guessing his overreaction, he can barely take in any information at all.

I guess this kind of stupid, noble act is fitting for the exhibit we’re in. Someone like Steve doing something like that for someone like me. This man, the one standing next to me right now, is practically a poster child for the Aryan race. He would have had propaganda campaigns modeled on his blond hair and blue eyes, his strong jaw, his tall, imposing stature. But the other Steve would have been no favored son of the Third Reich, physically defective and a homosexual to boot. If he wonders if all of this might have been him, too, he doesn’t wonder it aloud.

“I think I’m done,” I murmur.

It’s shameful. I should stay for all of it. I owe it to all of them, don’t I? We should duck into all of the theaters, watch the Soviets liberate the camps, watch all the survivors’ accounts, watch them go on to live full but shaken lives.

I feel his hand then, lightly, on my lower back. Touching and disappearing. I wish it didn’t disappear.

—

We walk in silence to the edge of the Mall. There are a few benches, but neither of us veer toward them. We find a patch of sunlit grass and sit cross legged, side by side and facing the Washington Monument. I close my eyes and tip my head back, feel the crisp breeze brushing over my face. It tugs my senses back to me, gently, and parts of this start to feel manageable again.

“I really think I’ve had it pretty easy,” I say.

“No. You haven’t.”

“Compared to that? My life is fucking charmed. The fact that I’m even here right now, talking to you?” I shake my head. “I’m really lucky.”

“It’s not a competition.”

“I had this feeling in there, this dread. Like…” I claw my hand into the center of my chest. “Something terrible was gonna happen, and I couldn’t stop it.”

He makes a small sound of acknowledgment.

“When I think about what’s happening to me, that’s all I feel. Horrible, crippling dread.”

“It’s not even about dying.” I don’t think it is, anyway. I can handle death. I’ve been waiting for it, I always figured it would happen on some mission. But not like this. Never like this. “It’s everything that’s gonna happen before. All the things I’m gonna lose. Not just my job and everything I worked for. I think I can handle that. It’s all the other things. Being weak, helpless, pathetic. Humiliated. I don’t wanna be humiliated like that. Not again.”

“Humiliated how?”

“I need to wash myself. I need to use the fucking bathroom myself. I need to walk. I need to have some control. If I can’t have that…” My words fail me then. “I can’t.”

I watch Steve pluck strands of grass from the lawn. He rolls them between his fingers and lets them fall.

“Do you think I was pathetic when I needed you for stuff like that?” he asks. “Did you think I was weak?”

I shake my head, brows drawing together. “You were sick. I never thought that. I just wanted to help you.”

“That’s what love is, you know? The love you have for your friend. You don’t see anything pathetic. You just see them. And you love them.”

My chin trembles, and I sniffle, wiping the side of my hand against my nose. Steve lies down on his back, stretches his long legs out, and tugs at my jacket. I follow, lying next to him. My pinky finger brushes his.

“I’m glad I had this week. I’m glad you encouraged me to do it.”

It’s not his usual tact, but I appreciate it now. He usually drives conversations like this into the ground, drags them through gravel until they’re worn to shreds. He’s usually an unrelenting agent of argument.

“What was your favorite part?” I ask, feeling the corner of my mouth twitch upward.

“Fury brought out the big guns. That was pretty amusing. He offered me a bigger office, gear, all the latest tech. Talked about some initiative of super people, me, Tony, Natasha. He’s not a beggar, but he came really close.”

“Hm.” It’s an entertaining image, Fury laying out most of his arsenal, he’ll never lay out the whole thing, he’s not that kind of guy, but he’ll show an awful lot.

His hand comes to rest on his stomach, the hand that’s not giving mine tiny twitches of his affection. “The thought of saving the world? I’m not gonna lie, that sounds pretty good. If I can help, shouldn’t I?”

“Yeah. You should.”

“But letting Zola in? We _knew_ he was horrible. It wasn’t even a theory, it was the truth. They had everything you told them. They knew, and they hired him anyway. And that was Peggy’s SHIELD.”

“I think she tried to stop it,” I say, imminently compelled to defend her. She knew, but she didn’t have that kind of clout back then. Her stature didn’t become full until much later, until the gears of social progress caught up to her potential.

“They weaponized the Tesseract,” Steve says gravely. “Just like Hydra. They did the same thing. If we asked Schmidt why, you think he’d answer any different than them?”

When you’re someone like me, you get good at this kind of moral pivoting. What was the bad guy thinking, what was the good guy thinking, who is bad, who is good, it all dissolves when held too long.

“Schmidt might call it something else,” he says, “but it would be the same thing. They both want power. And control. It’s just what people want. What organizations want.”

It’s what I want. More than anything. More than almost anything.

“I’m not going to work for them.” I hear the faint sound of him swallowing. ”I just can’t. I need to do things on my own terms.”

I’m looking at him now, smiling. “Can’t say I’m really surprised. So, what are you gonna do?”

Steve rolls over onto his side and rests his head on my metal shoulder. It can’t be comfortable, but he doesn’t squirm away. He drapes his arm over my chest and goes quiet for a very long time. His fingers glide over my side, he seems to have learned a way to do it without making me flinch away. I don’t want to flinch away from him.

“I really like this,” he says. “I wanna do this.”

God, I wanna do this, too. I don’t know why I’m so delirious, so light, when I feel him this heavy against me.

I lay my hand over his forearm and give him a squeeze. “I don’t know if I’m gonna stay here. I’ve been thinking about…”

I pause, because it sounds so stupid when I think it. Such a puerile, ridiculous fantasy, the kind of thing built into some child’s imaginary world, when he dreams about his life, before he’s old enough to know the hard, grim limits of reality.

“A house,” I say, finally.

“Really?” There’s a smile in his voice. “Where?”

“I don’t know. But maybe there’s a yard. Trees. Some water. Somewhere quiet. Big kitchen. Lots of light.”

“Sounds nice.”

“I want some quiet. If I’m doing this, I wanna just see what it’s like.”

My little notion drapes over us. I wonder if he’s imagining it too, if he can see it as clearly in his mind’s eye as I can. I don’t think I’ve ever been to that place, but I kind of want to find it.

“I would come with you,” he says softly. “Only if you wanted. But I would.”

I dip my head and brush my nose against his head. “Is it weird that I’ve thought about it? When I was out there, I thought about it. And I wished I’d done it. I wished you were there.”

His hand presses to my ribcage. He holds me like that, solid and more sure than I am about this crazy fucking idea. “We can do it. Whatever you want. I… I’d come with you, and I’ll take care of you. Whatever happens. I’d be—”

“Don’t you dare say ‘honored.’”

“I was gonna say grateful. I just want to be with you. Right now, that’s all I want.”

I’m not grinning. Maybe I should be. I get the sense that’s the appropriate response for something like this, when your silly dreams, the ones with people you care about, break out of the safety of their imaginary constraints and tumble into the real world. It feels goddamn near delusional.

But.

_But_.

“I think I want that, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: extensive description of The Holocaust


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://dreadnought-dear-captain.tumblr.com/) for asks and additional content, as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DreadDearCap)
> 
> Beta work provided by the tireless and phenomenal [pitchforkcentral86](https://pitchforkcentral86.tumblr.com/). For this fic, she is also generously serving as my Jewish subject matter expert and sensitivity reader.

“I’m moving to Cape Cod.”

Hill’s eyebrows climb. Fury’s head drifts to the side, as slow and dramatic as a felled tree.

“You’re moving _where_?” Hill asks.

“I mean, I don’t know exactly where. But somewhere on the cape.”

My voice might be steady, but I hardly feel like I’m the one uttering the words. Maybe it’s all the practice I did, running through simulations of possible conversational pathways, arranging them into a neat flow chart, if this, then that. I muttered through it in the shower and in the car, _I’m moving to Cape Cod, I’m moving to Cape Cod, I’m moving to Cape Fucking Cod oh God what the fuck am I doing—_

Fury tilts back in his chair. “Well, okay.”

“What are you gonna do with your apartment?” Hill says.

I shrug. “Sell it, I guess. Why, you want it?”

She presses a hand to the surface of Fury’s desk, leaning into it. “Are you okay?”

“Fine. Why?”

“You seem…” Fury starts.

They finish the sentence simultaneously:

“Strange.”

“Happy.”

This is the part where my t-shirt begins to feel as stifling as a cable knit sweater. I knew they’d push back; it would be uncharacteristic and irresponsible for them not to. But I’m reminded once more why I hate being on this side of the desk.

“Well, yeah, I’m riding the high for now. I’m sure I’ll crash later.” I let out a flimsy chuckle. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back to my usual self soon.”

I can do this. I’m fine. This is fine. I made a choice. It’s a good one. I think so. I think—

“What’s gonna happen to Rogers?” Hill asks.

I shift my weight and cross my arms. I don’t thank this arm enough for all the good it does for me, whether it’s yanking car doors off their hinges or cooling my distressingly overheated body.

“Ah, he’s moving, too.”

Honestly, this shouldn’t be as shocking as their expressions would suggest. This was him just a couple weeks ago, dropping the bomb that he’s not going to work for them. He’s honored and all that shit — I’m sure he said so, he’s Steve Rogers for fuck’s sake — but he’s taking things in a different direction. He conceded to being on call for international crises, end of the world stuff, but he made it clear that it’d better be real goddamn important. I don’t think he practiced his speech at all.

“Well, all right.” Fury doesn’t filter the disappointment from his voice.

And I get it. I’ve been in the big chair when one of my good agents was delivering news about a surprise pregnancy, a sick parent, a newfound passion for cake decorating. Sometimes they’d be smiling, sometimes they’d be trying to hold back tears. I perfected my artifice of sympathy or compassion or excitement, whatever the situation dictated. And I am capable of all of these things organically, sometimes I even feel them, but very little hits me harder than a talented agent throwing in the towel, no matter how justified. It burrows underneath my skin and seethes there, I know it’s stupid to be so petulant about it, but I hate it every time it happens, even as I’m picking out congratulatory cards at Hallmark to send around the office.

Focus, Barnes. Fuck. This is the easy part.

“I’ve prepared a transition plan.” I stoop down to my messenger bag, pull two bound documents, and slide them across the table. “The first three phases involve me directly. I’ll submit my resignation after that.”

Hill takes a copy and thumbs through it. Fury does not.

“Are you sure about this?” he says. “They’re still working downstairs.”

I snort. “And how’s that going?”

“Like I said, they’re working.”

I paid them a visit last week. I let an overexcited young white coat drag me around the lab, explaining all the tests and extractions and arrays, sparing very few details about how innovative it all was. They use rats instead of mice — I’m not sure why that bothered me. She was a burbling ambassador of Science until I asked her how close they were to finding a fix for me. She paused then, and I knew her answer before she even delivered it. _We’re still working. We have lots of ideas. We’re working hard._

In other words, they don’t have shit, or even a remotely realistic prospect of shit.

“Well, while they’re ‘working,’” I say, “I need to imagine that they’re gonna fail or else I’m gonna drop dead at my desk. And you know I’m a dedicated employee, but that’s just sad.”

Hill is squinting at me now. “Are you... under the influence?”

“No! Is it so weird for me to be a little pleasant?”

“You want us to be honest?” Fury asks, brow rising. It’s not quite a dare, because I know he’ll have very little compunction about being brutally truthful.

“We just hope you’re not giving up,” Hill says softly.

Oh, no. I’m not biting on this little morsel. There’s nothing sad here. I’m just going to buy a house. In Cape Cod. With Steve Rogers. Ten thousand of his fangirls would die to be me right now.

Ha.

“Like I said, I need to move on while I’m still topside.”

“Don’t resign,” she says. “You don’t need to.”

“Yes, I do.”

“She means that we’ll—” Fury pauses, at a rare, if temporary, loss for words. “We’ll put you on a leave of absence. So you can keep your insurance.”

My chest constricts, but it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s _fine._ I know admin. It’s not just for me. They did it for Markovic. Until he… yeah.

“Okay, I might need that. How long?”

“As long as you need,” he replies.

As long as I need. Until whatever. Until I don’t need it anymore.

I grab my bag and load it across my chest. “Great. Now I’m gonna go before I change my mind.”

“All right,” Fury says.

I feel a strained smile on my face as I nod and make for the door. I almost get there, I’m so close, I’m almost free, and then:

“You and Rogers, huh?”

I don’t know why I thought I’d get out of here without having to field this particular insinuation. I stop but don’t turn back to them. I don’t want them to scrutinize my face, dig for any more than I’m willing to give. And on this topic, I’m not feeling particularly charitable.

So I shrug.

“All right,” he repeats.

And I guess that’s all you can say about something like this. All right. Godspeed with your gay lifestyle.

There’s a discomfiting swoop in my guts as the door whooshes shut behind me. I take a deep breath and push it through pursed lips to quell the sick feeling. I’ve had a lot of practice with that lately.

_Done,_ I might text, if I was that kind of guy.

_Wow. Congrats_ , he might say.

_Now we just need to figure out what the fuck we’re doing._

_We’ll get there. Relax. I love you. I’m with you. It’s going to be okay. You’re fine, Bucky, you’re fine._

My head snaps up just in time to avoid plowing through a cluster of dopey-eyed junior officers. I think I mutter something like “Jesus, watch out,” and I guess I’m done being pleasant for today.

—

“What about Provincetown?”

My lip curls up. “Too touristy.”

Steve taps his foot against my thigh. “I thought it was cute.”

It was pretty cute. I don’t use the word often, especially not for uppity gay tourist traps, but there’s not really another word for it.

I said I don’t believe in signs, and I’m still not sure I fully do. But we were book hunting at Barnes and Noble, trolling the stacks for novels for some road trip we only had a vague sense of at that time. Steve wandered off, swept away by the sheer volume, the impossible choices, and I found him poring over the home and garden section of the magazine rack, thumbing through glossy photos of houses. It’s like a screaming biological clock for him, ever since we floated the idea that day in the park together. Steve, born, bred, and wed to apartment living, has gone completely house crazy. He turned to me then, a giddy little grin on his face, and he thrust the open magazine at me. I didn’t know what to call it, but it was— yeah. It was really nice. I asked him where it was, _who cares,_ he said, _doesn’t it look amazing_?

It did. The house was what I know now — after Steve’s fastidious research — as a Cape Cod. I couldn’t tell if it was two stories or one-and-a-half, but it was beautiful, nestled on a green, tree-lined lawn, a brilliant spread of gray-blue water just behind it. I don’t think of myself as someone who gets sappy over things like this, but I could see us there, puttering around the grass, maybe planting things, lounging in the sun or the shade. I’d cook in that glorious kitchen on the next page, serve him three squares a day on a rustic, wooden table, I’ve been wanting to try so many recipes, expand Steve’s stunted palate to the fringes. It was real then, in the way that a daydream can feel more true to life than the three dimensional version. I closed the magazine and tucked it under my arm, and I’m pretty sure I was smiling, too.

“I just don’t wanna deal with all the bullshit on every grocery run,” I grumble.

“I mean,” he presses, “wouldn’t it be nice, though? Being… I dunno. Open. Not having to worry about the neighbors.”

“Fuck the neighbors.”

I’ve fucked in almost every way imaginable, ways that even embarrass me now. But doing the public thing, I fumbled my way through it like a quivering virgin. It wasn’t bad, just strange, like the first time you encounter a new language where the letters all curve and swirl or where the sounds are borne from pictures that evolved from literal objects. And Steve started it, though he might not have been the first one to think about it. I was thinking about it on the plane, even on the way to the plane. Would our elbows touch, and if they did, would everyone know? Do people in a relationship lean differently? Sit differently? It’s not that I care what people think, I really don’t, but transparency is new for me. They would see us, and they would know me in ways I can’t control. They would know my heart.

But it got pretty easy, once he started it. We were at a cheap table, sitting in cheap chairs, but what else would you expect at a place called The Lobster Pot? We ordered an obscene amount of food, more than even two metabolically supercharged men could eat in one sitting. At least we were by the window; it bought us some room, some distraction, from our awkward navigation of us. We people watched. We pretended nobody recognized us, and if they did, nobody was brave enough to do more than glance our way. But I was overwhelmed by the hot and strange feeling of being seen. It might not even have been real. Or it might have just been Steve, seeing me.

I was mid-sentence, something about trying to get Steve’s birth certificate, when he grabbed my hand from across that shitty table and held it. For as bold of a move as it was, his gaze drifted to the window and locked there. He was swallowing, pinking in the ears, grabbing me a little more tightly than a lover probably should, the grip of a nearly dead man teetering off a thin, metal bar.

I held it back because I’m no coward, there’s not a game of chicken on this planet that I wouldn’t win, and we sweated and bumbled through it until the lobster came. And that was it. And Cape Cod became it, too.

“We could just get a real estate agent. Let them figure it out,” he says.

I glance up from my computer. We’re mirror images of each other, backs against either end of the couch, legs outstretched. “Yeah. I guess.”

He slaps his laptop closed and snatches his notebook off the table. He flips — he has to flip a lot now — until he finds a blank page and poises his pen over it.

“Okay, let’s make a list. What do we want?”

“Waterfront,” I say reflexively.

“Okay.”

“Yard. Kitchen. Big kitchen. Good appliances.”

He scrawls quickly, then adds: “Library.”

“Definitely.”

Our eyes meet. His mouth quirks to the side as he thinks.

“Extra bedrooms,” I add. “For guests.”

This seems to please him. “Porch? Patio?”

“Yeah.”

“Lots of light?”

“Yeah.”

“Cute little village?”

“Yeah.”

Steve lays his pen down, face falling. “You just ‘yeahing’ me now?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s wrong?”

Yes, what is wrong? Why do I always seem to vapor lock every time I tread too far into our future?

“This is just fucking crazy,” I mutter, laying my computer on the coffee table.

“I know,” he says. “I never thought I’d live in an actual house.”

“I’m quitting my _job._ ”

Steve catches up quickly, and all of the humor, all of the lightness, drops off his face. I hate to always be the killer of his joy. I have a feeling this is a habit I’m going to have a difficult time breaking.

“You could stay on part time,” he says.

I’m scowling now, the idea so aversive that it’s almost sickening. “I just don’t want to.”

“Then don’t,” he says easily. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” I snap. “None of this is fine. This is fucked up. I don’t know how to do this.”

“You made a very detailed plan. You just have to follow it.”

“I know, but it’s…” I shove my palm against my forehead, it’s so tight there that it feels like my skull is about to crack through my skin.

I feel his bare foot again, slowly brushing against my thigh. He’s good at this, these small motions of comfort. “Okay. We’ll just take one step at a time. Or no steps. We’ll figure it out.”

“This is stupid.” I say it so quietly that it's barely there, but of course he hears. He sees the shape of my lips as they make these desperate words.

“What’s stupid?”

“My feelings. They’re stupid. And annoying.”

‘Which ones?”

I shake my head. “I want my job, I don’t want my job, I need to work, I can’t stand the thought of it. I wanna move, I don’t wanna go.”

“We don’t have to do any of it. Like I said, we can do nothing.”

It’s a nice idea, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who still thinks like this. Yes, let’s just freeze time. Let’s just find a nice hole to press our faces into and pretend to pray that nothing changes, that we can sit on the couch like two invincible men, playing footsie, dreaming about futures forever. There’s something comforting about his denial, nestled so tenderly next to mine.

“Let’s just go next weekend,” I say. “Look at places. See how we feel.”

“Okay. We could drive this time, if you want.”

“God,” I groan, “I forgot I gotta give the car back. I hate that car, but man. I like having a car.”

“I’ll buy one.” His mouth tips into an endearing smile, and he lays his laptop and notepad on the coffee table. “I kinda want one of my own.”

It’s a good idea. He should have it in his name.

He swings his legs to the floor and stands, pulling my ankle to urge me onto my back. Then he settles down on the cushion on his knees and stretches himself over me. I spread my legs to accommodate, and his head comes to rest on the softer side of my chest.

“Better get your license first,” I murmur as I wrap my arms around him.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Oh, are you ‘yeahing’ me now?”

He makes a pleased little sound, nuzzling his cheek against me. “Yeah.”

—

Tony is very good at holding grudges. I’ve always known this. I’ve just never been on the business end of it before. And I don’t like it.

He flings his hand toward the scale and stalks to his bench. I step onto it, dutifully.

“JARVIS, weight.”

“87.8 kilograms.”

“Last weight.”

“88.9 kilograms.”

“Total loss since day one.”

“10.3 kilograms.”

He doesn’t pull out any sludge for me to drink. He doesn’t lecture me. Instead, he drops into his rolling stool and spins slowly. Around. And around. And around.

“So…” I start.

“Shh.”

I shut up. I step off the scale and lean against the closest bench, the one that has the arm. It has a real name, some acronym I can’t recall, but I call it Jerry just to piss him off. Usually.

The swirling stops, abruptly. He talks toward the solid wall of windows. “I’m calling Dr. Ali. I’m gonna take your blood, and you’re gonna get scans.”

“Okay.”

“Today. Now.”

“Okay.”

He swivels toward me, just enough to eye me out of his periphery. “You know why I’m pissed?”

“I think so.”

His mouth twists sharply. “Good. ‘Cause I’m not gonna say it.”

“I know.”

There’s a huff, the kind stifled by a tight jaw. “So you gonna be some Cape Cod yuppie now?”

“Yeah. Guess so.”

“I’m supposed to be the one with the yuppie pedigree here.” He says it to his lap, where he fidgets at a thin woven bracelet. I don’t remember ever seeing him before in any kind of adornment.

“You’ll have to come visit. Make sure we do it right.”

“Ah, you’re gonna have to ingratiate yourself to me a little more before I agree to come crash at your pad.”

My mouth tilts upward. He’ll do it. He’ll come over. He might bring Pepper, but I could just as easily see him alone there, walking the rooms of our home, casting his arrogant, evaluative gaze over the countertops and the window dressings, grimacing and _hmph_ ing, and God, I can see that. I wanna see Steve’s face when he does it, Steve’s narrowed eyes, crossed arms, how dare Howard’s son denigrate his home. But I’d give him an easy smile, calm him down, because this is just Tony. This is one of my oldest, dearest friends.

“I’m gonna say something stupid,” he mumbles.

What’s new? “Okay.”

“We’ve known each other for a long time.”

He might hate me for grinning, he seems to hate it more than anything else I do these days. But I’ll never apologize for it. “Yeah, we have.”

Tony spins away again. “I wanna keep it that way.”

“I know. Me too.”

“ _Remember_ that.”

I nod, even though he can’t see me do it. “I will.”

I don’t know how Tony does it — I imagine bundles of cash and potentially other perks are involved — but Dr. Ali arrives just over an hour later. I know him well enough that he can get me to sit, he can get me to lie down and slide into coffin-like imagery machines without having a meltdown. Something about his voice rolling smooth in my ear, _That’s it, Mr. Barnes, almost done_ , he could tell me that for five hours straight and I’d believe him. He takes my blood and my piss and sends them STAT to the biotech floor, then he gives me a slow, polite interrogation about all of my symptoms. Tony looms, pacing a trail across the floor, shooting me intemperate glances when I say something he doesn’t like — I throw up once or twice a week, I get splotchy vision at least as many times, my lungs feel half full of cement at some point most days, things hurt. My back hurts. My knees hurt. My shoulder hurts, but different.

Ali motions for me to strip down, and when I pull off my shirt, Tony bee-lines to the edge of the examination table.

“Jesus Christ!”

For a few seconds, it’s not Tony. It’s Howard, one of those exasperated outbursts that could be anger or surprise.

“How long?” Tony asks.

“I dunno,” I say to Ali. I can’t seem to make eye contact with Tony. “Three months, four months.”

“Oh my _God._ ” He turns, palms pressing to his temples, and he wanders away, only to whirl around and stalk back.

Ali presses his gloved finger gently over the reddish-pink seam where my flesh is straining against metal. I flinch away from him.

“There’s detachment here.”

“Yeah, you think?”

Ali raises a brow, and Tony corrects, apologizing swiftly, quietly. But he does come for me again, stopping at the edge of my thigh.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he hisses between clenched teeth. “You need a whole refit. _God_.”

Why bother? It’s not like I’m gonna need it. But I can be a little bit like Romanoff. I know how to read the room.

“A different material, smaller frame, you’d get much better adhesion,” Ali observes.

I nod. A new arm, in other words. And not this one.

Ali lays a warm hand on my shoulder, the one that’s not actively breaking down, and squeezes. “Let’s get you a CT scan. See what’s going on inside.”

I want to run. And I can’t. I have to know this. And I did say I was good at chicken.

—

“I’m sorry,” Ali says.

I’m sorry. _I’m sorry_. In there, just below and unspoken, is: _there’s_ _nothing I can do._ And I knew, right? I’ve known this whole time. But to hear it… is new.

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say to something like this, so I thank him. Fortunately, it comes out of me level, steady and controlled, the voice of a man who’s broken bad news before. _I’m sorry for your loss. He died in service to the safety of our entire world._

Tony remains silent, slumped in his stool, arms cradled against his middle, as Ali offers a few parting shots — the contact info for a reliable palliative care doc on the cape, his own number, his assurances that he’ll do whatever he can, just call. He’s very kind, mild mannered, large but easy in the hands. My dad’s Iranian counterpart. He leaves a few minutes later with a bottle of some juice or another that he and Tony seem to have tendered as part of his payment.

And we’re alone again. I check my watch. Pepper and Steve must be working overtime at distracting themselves, I can only imagine what they’ve been doing since lunch.

Tony is barely spinning now, propelling himself around with just the tip of his sneaker. I imagine this all percolating through him, dense but persistent as it squirms around the pockets of his resistance.

“When did you say you were moving?” he asks.

“I’m not sure. We gotta find a place first.”

“You and _Rogers?_ ” His face crimps and sours, like he just bit into an underripe piece of fruit. “Really?”

“Really.”

His mouth opens in the precipitous way it does when he’s about to say something moronic. I brace myself.

“So, who’s the—”

I cut him off with a hard glare.

“—cook?”

I scoff. “Obviously me.”

Tony chortles, and I realize what I’ve inadvertently done.

“Okay, okay.” I press my hand out toward him. “Enough about my culinary life.”

He falls quiet, eyes distant, then shakes his head sharply with a _bleh_ of disgust. He rises abruptly. “You said you’re gonna have an extra room?”

“Yeah. It’s yours, if you want it.”

There’s a metallic jingling as he dips his hand into a box of parts resting near the end of the table. “You should go.”

“Why you gotta kick me out?”

“Because.” Tony’s digging intensifies, then he picks up a fist full of hardware and drops it on the table. “I’m gonna do something embarrassing.”

I raise my brows. “Ooh, like what?”

“Just _go._ ”

“What floor are we on again?”

“35th.” He hunches over the bench and, as intently as a child assembling a model airplane, begins sorting — nuts in one pile, bolts in another.

“Breakfast tomorrow?” I offer.

He groans. “Fine. 11:00. Top floor.”

“You know that’s not breakfast, right?”

“Just be there.” He floats his hand in my direction to shoo me off. It’s different from when I first arrived, graceful, like a danseur extending into second position.

“All right, all right. I’m going.”

He makes another _bleh_ sound, weaker, affectionate, and I see myself out.

—

I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, like I’ve been for the past hour. My body has been pendulously careening between numb stillness and furious bouts of anxiety, the miserable, jittering kind, the kind that raised my weekly puke count to three. My toothbrush trembled in my mouth, and I could barely brush my tongue without making it a fourth. I can’t believe I let myself forget my Xanax, I told myself that I wouldn’t need it. For _this._ The depth of my stupidity seems to be bottomless.

I startle at the polite droll of JARVIS informing me that Steve is back. I mutter to myself, compel myself to breathe, and unbury my fingertips from where they’ve sunk deep into the flesh of the mattress. I’m on my feet the second the door opens, my body a lit fuse skittering to its explosive end. Steve’s smile falters as I rush him, and I crush my lips against his, wringing a muffled sound from him. I yank him by the front of his coat, and he follows gracelessly as I drag him across the room, all rough hands and tongue. I grab whatever I can of him and probably a little too hard, if his unsteady groan and iron grip on my shoulders are any indicator, like I’m some rickety carnival ride he’s not sure he’ll survive. I twist us around and shove him away from me, and he doesn’t look back as he falls onto the edge of the mattress. He didn’t doubt for a second that he would land safely.

I tear off my shirt and shove down my pants, and this seems to be both happening and not, possibly me doing this but maybe not. I feel here and away, and he watches this me or not-me with a stupefied look, a little horny, a little concerned, a little too much of both of these things to say anything whole. He shifts back on the mattress and lets me strip him down to his underwear and mount him, lets me drag my face, my mouth, my tongue, over him, and I moan as a restless energy redoubles in me with an intensity that almost feels violent.

“Bucky…”

I find his nipple and lap at it. His fingers thread into my hair.

He pets me. And then urges my head up.

“What?” I snap.

“Stop.”

I breathe, a rough and grating sound. “ _What?_ ”

“What’d the doctor say?”

I slip out of his hold and dip back down to brush my lips over his neck. He likes this. He likes it light and then hard and then light again. He loves a good hickey. I’ll give him ten to shut him the fuck up right now.

But when his hands land on me again, they’re firm. Unyielding. He makes me look him in the eyes. “Stop and tell me what he said.”

I have no right to be this angry. I have no right to any thoughts of continuing, I wouldn’t, I never would, but I’m desperate to stop this, and I don’t know how. If he wants this, I don’t know what to do.

I collapse on top of him. There’s an unsettling sound then, a held breath finally being released. God, is that what he thinks of me? Was that fear slipping out of him?

His arms come around me. He holds me, like he could siphon this disaster out of me, pull it in through his skin. And I don’t know, maybe he can.

“I don’t want this to get in the way of everything.” I mutter it against his skin.

“I know, but you can’t fuck your way around this. I’m not _that_ easy.”

I nod. I know. I know that.

“If you wanna do this,” he says softly, “whatever the hell this is, you gotta gimme something.”

I sigh. At least he’s not resentful over my implicit refusal to name what he is to me. To call this relationship anything. To tell him that I feel the way he does. Thank God for this sliver of gray space within him.

Unfortunately, I don’t quite have Dr. Ali’s poise and compassion, his wise choice of words. I spell out my death to Steve with the listless dispassion of a phone book reading.

“My lungs are fucked. My guts are fucked. My joints and muscles are fucked. My brain is fucked. Kidneys are probably gonna get fucked here pretty soon.”

His heart rests beneath my ear, the tempo working into a sprint that betrays the calm in his voice. “And what does ‘fucked’ mean?”

“Decreased functioning. Shutting down slowly. Or not so slowly, in some cases.”

“Okay.” He pats my shoulder blade. “Thank you.”

I hum my acquiescence, my thanks, that he doesn’t go further. That he doesn’t ask how long before each of these systems actually fails. I wouldn’t know what to say if he did.

“You’re handling all this pretty well,” I say.

“I said I could. I meant it.”

I let myself believe him. For now.

“I just need to feel normal, you know?” I say softly. “For as long as I can. Until I can’t.”

His hand drifts down to my ass. He squeezes and rubs, his heart still thumping with an unusual urgency. “You can fuck me.”

I press a kiss to the warm skin of his chest. “I want you to want it.”

His fingers trace my jaw. “Kiss me.”

I push myself up, and I do. He kisses me back, and this almost feels okay. Maybe I could amputate away everything I know about him, the parts that I know aren’t abiding any of this, or parts that simply won’t believe it. I know I’m not the only one who’s talented in the art of denial.

Steve rolls onto his side and guides my hand to the band of his underwear. He likes it when I take them off, when I push them down slowly over the curve of his ass, when I touch him, when I kiss his shoulder, when I reach around and move his cock out of the way. He’s barely hard.

“You want me to talk dirty?” I murmur in his ear, pushing my hips against him.

He shakes his head, eyes slipping closed. “I just want you inside.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he whispers.

And so I give him what he wants.

—

“Does this happen with all your other lovers? Or am I just embarrassingly lacking in stamina?”

Steve chuckles as he slides on a pair of fresh underwear. “All my other lovers?”

“You’ve had some, right?”

“Since this?” He gestures up and down his body and then flops onto the bed next to me. “Just a couple. I had way more before.”

“Wait, before-before?” I slide in close to him and pillow my head on his outstretched arm.

“Oh yeah. I had a certain appeal to certain men.”

It’s another adjustment I have to make to my image of him, the memories of before. Nights he came home late from work, was he out with certain men? Did he live in that world, did people know him there, did he scramble away from raids, flirt and drink with the queens and the married guys? It makes me a little sad, in an odd, incongruous way.

“It’s hard to last when I’m fucking you. I feel like I’m sixteen, just barely slide in and I’m done.”

If I’m being completely frank, a part of me is cheerfully willing to attribute this to Steve himself — his intense sexiness, his beauty, his strength, the way he never submits to me, even as I’m fucking the most vulnerable and raw sounds out of him. But another part of me can’t help but wonder if this is a glimpse into my future, where all my efforts at building my sexual prowess, training my body, snatching any trick from any source, are going to be useless as my insides collapse.

“I wouldn’t know,” Steve says with a lazy smile. “Never been the one doing the fucking.”

I lift my head. “Never once?”

“Nah.”

“God, it feels so good.”

“To me, that’s like saying, ‘do you want this piece of delicious red velvet cake, the one you know you love, or do you want to try this handful of raisins I found under the fridge?’”

I laugh. “Fucking someone is raisins under the fridge?”

Steve’s fingertips drift over the plating of my forearm. “Have you had any red velvet cake?”

“Yeah, I’ve had it a few times. I’m more of a raisin guy.”

“More for me, I guess.”

I watch his fingers graze over the place where skin used to be. It’s been so long since I’ve had a real left arm that I barely remember what it looked like. How hairy it was or wasn’t. If it had any moles or if it freckled in the sun.

“Enjoy that arm while you can,” I say. “I’m trading it in soon.”

He lays his palm flat on my forearm and grips. “Wait, why?”

“Well, there’s not really a practical need for it anymore. The doc said I’d be more comfortable with a synthetic one. The fancy StarkTech one, I can’t remember what version they’re on. They’re almost creepily real.”

As I say it, my stomach seizes again, a rapid onset terror that overheats me acutely. I push away from him and roll over onto my back, wondering if I need to make my way to the bathroom again. I close my eyes and imagine cool water, calm and still. I breathe and dip into it.

“What’s gonna happen to the metal one?” he asks.

“I dunno.”

I can’t remember exactly how much Tony said it’s worth, but certainly in the neighborhood of a couple new summer houses in the Hamptons. He could melt it down and use it to cut uncuttable things. He could press it into a new chest piece for his suit.

“He should make it into a ring. For Pepper,” Steve suggests.

I chuckle. “Yeah? You think she actually wants to marry him?”

“I think she will. If he doesn’t do anything too stupid in the next couple years.”

I turn my head to him. Our eyes meet, and I can’t keep a smile off my face. Every new piece of himself that assembles, a friendship, socks, books, every clue of himself that he shows me makes me so fucking happy that I almost can’t bear it.

I lay my leg over his. “Did you two gossip about me?”

“Of course.”

I wait for a few moments, tapping my toes against the bottom of his foot. His mouth slips open.

“Do you think JARVIS was watching?” he asks in a low voice.

I scan around the room for any obvious signs of a camera, not that any camera Tony installed would be in any way obvious. “Maybe not watching, but definitely listening.”

He turns and folds himself against me. His palm slides up my thigh, his whisper thick. “I bet we sound really hot together.”

“Oh God, I bet JARVIS has his own wank bank full of fuck tracks.”

He’s laughing, even as his hand slides between my legs. “We don’t have to again,” he murmurs, “I just wanna touch you.”

“Yeah….” I breathe. “Yeah.”

—

“This is your classical Cape Cod, a lot of rich history. The last owners gave it a lot of love.”

The woman likes to say ‘a lot’ a lot. She places a hard emphasis on it each time she uses it, like this whole thing is _a lot_ for her. And I suppose it is, to have Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes shopping for a house together. Lisa is petite and cute, probably only a couple years older than Steve, wearing the kind of tasteful suit befitting an agent of Sotheby’s.

“The appliances are all new.” She gestures toward the brushed steel facade of the fridge, clutching her portfolio beneath her other arm. She walks me through the obvious, the gas range, the dishwasher, the tasteful craftsman cabinetry.

Steve has drifted to the wall of picture windows overlooking a vast yard and, just beyond that, the dock leading to a pond. His hands rest on his hips, and a contented smile rests on his face, as if he’s imagining himself out there, maybe imagining us the way I do. Happy.

“The floors are original. A lot of buyers are looking for original wood, and this place has it.”

I couldn’t care less whether the wood is original, as long as it looks nice. This one’s a good color, a tight weave of deep walnut. I haven’t spotted a scrap of carpet yet, thank God.

“Is there an en suite bathroom in the master bedroom?” I ask.

“Yes, absolutely. You wanna go up and take a look?”

“Steve?”

He turns. “Hm?”

“We’re gonna go upstairs.”

“Yeah, yeah. Let’s go.”

We trail after her at a distance. He leans in close. “I love this place.”

“Me, too.”

I climb the stairs, Steve’s ass perfectly at eye level. We’ve been trading in this little game of Watch the Butt, a silent gag that only we know is running. He climbs and I climb, and then… he’s climbing higher, and I am not. I grab the rail hard, bearing myself against the shifting of the stairs. In the distance, I hear Steve’s _Oh, wow_ and her _Yeah, I know. A lot of light up here, too._

“Hey, there’s not even any carpet!” he calls. Then, after a pause — “Buck?”

I force my leg to move, until my foot feels steady on the next stair, and then the next. He appears at the top of the stairs then, brows raised.

“Just… looking for cracks.”

“Cracks? In the wood?”

“Creaks.”

“Oh. Find any?”

Up. Go up. Keep moving. I climb for Steve, concentrating on keeping my spine charm school straight, imagining a stack of books on top of my head. When I get to him, he grabs my wrist, a fleeting squeeze delivered with a steady smile.

There’s a clacking of heels as Lisa finds us again. “It’s a grand staircase, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I mutter. “Sure is.”

—

I like this, the gentle lap of water, the squawking of geese carving a V across the sky. I imagine the sound of stones we might toss. The plunk into the pond. The delicate shift of maple leaves in the breeze. The tiny gulps of turtles.

There’s a new sound now, the firm steps of a large man over wooden planks. There’s a lighter step after, a careful clicking of Lisa’s shoes. She’s talking about the pond, a lot of opportunities to fish or boat or kayak, even paddle boat.

The footsteps stop and he’s crouching down next to me. “Hey, are you okay?”

“Stairs are… not gonna work.”

“Can we have a few minutes?” he calls over his shoulder.

“Of course! I’ll meet you back inside.”

“Thanks.”

Steve drops down next to me, his long legs dangling over the edge of the dock.

“There’s gonna come a time...”

“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not.”

I can’t repeat his uncertainty back to him. I can’t take it as my own. Because I feel certain of this. There will come a day, maybe soon, when I won’t be able to walk up stairs. Maybe not even walk at all. I can’t fashion myself into that familiar fantasy, the two of us living easily, laughing, when I’m a man who can’t even walk.

“I can’t do this.”

I say it, but I don’t say it. It’s breath through moving lips.

“Yes, you can. You’ve got this. We’ve got this. We’ll find the place.”

Why do I feel so alone? Why do I feel like I’m the only one here? Just me and this pond, me and these geese, these turtles. Me and this body, this rotten, dying body.

I lean. I don’t know how else to ask.

There’s a weight then, his arm encircling me, pulling me in. I close my eyes and slump, collapse like a tired child against him. I’m very tired.

And he’s here. I’m in his arms. The water laps and laps and I could sleep like this. And I think, maybe, that I could even die like this.

“I like this pond a lot,” I say.

“Oh, yes. A lot of buyers appreciate a good pond.”

My laugh is weak, but it’s real. This is real. My body. Him. This place. This is no fantasy. Somehow, this is real.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

He kisses my temple.


End file.
